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THE AGRICULTURAL 
COLLEGE 



Other Books by the Same Author 

Landscape Gardening 

Plums and Plum Culture 

Fruit Harvesting, Storing, Marketing 

Systematic Pomology 

Dwarf Fruit Trees 

The American Apple Orchard 

The Landscape Beautiful 

Beginner's Guide to Fruit Growing 

The American Peach Orchard 

Rural Improvement 



THE 

AGRICULTURAL 

COLLEGE 



A Study in Organization and Management 
and Especially in Problems of Teaching 



By FRANK A. WAUGH 



NEW YORK 
ORANGE JUDD COMPANY 
1916 






Copyright, 1916, by 

ORANGE JUDD COMPANY 

All Rights Reserved 



4''' 







NOV 17 1916 

Printed in U. S. A. 

©CI,A44(MG9 



Inscribed 
To the Memory of 

GEORGE THOMPSON FAIRCHILD 

Personal Friend and Teacher 

Pioneer and Leader in Agricultural Education 



PREFACE 

NEARLY all the books dealing with 
college problems have been written 
by college presidents. They are good fel- 
lows, those college presidents, and their 
point of view is important. But the teach- 
er's point of view is important, too. The 
teacher is the man who stands closest to the 
real college problem — the problem of teach- 
ing. 

So the teacher ought to know what he is 
doing, and why. And he ought to see his 
work in relation to all the other work of the 
college. This means that he should have a 
clear conception of college policies. I hope 
that this book will make it seem worth while 
to look at college questions from the teach- 
er's point of view; and most of all, I wish 
that teachers might awaken to the necessity 
of broadening their views of such questions. 
Too many teachers are content to know 
nothing outside their own departments. 

Perhaps this is peculiarly true of the ag- 

ix 



PREFACE 

ricultural college with its faculty of special- 
ists, each one comfortably ensconced in his 
own fascinating department. At any rate, 
the special problems of the agricultural 
college have not been sufficiently studied, 
most of the books on college and university 
management having come from other quar- 
ters. This fact ofifers an additional reason 
for the appearance of the present book. 

Most students of education now believe 
that agriculture is destined to play a large 
role in the future of general education. 
Certainly the rapid extension of agricul- 
tural teaching into the secondary and pri- 
mary schools is one of the striking educa- 
tional movements of the day. In any such 
movement for general agricultural educa- 
tion the agricultural colleges obviously 
ought to exercise a wise and influential 
leadership. At the moment it seems possible 
that they may fail measurably in this oppor- 
tunity. Such failure as may come will be due 
chiefly to a lack of understanding, on the 
part of the colleges, of the broad questions 
of agricultural education. For this reason 
also it is greatly to be desired that all men in 

X 



PREFACE 

the agricultural colleges should develop 
clear and correct ideas in educational policy, 
first as to internal college policy, and then 
as to the larger policies of agricultural edu- 
cation as a part of a national school system. 

The author has not hoped to say the last 
word on the subject. For this reason he has 
aimed at a suggestive rather than an ex- 
haustive treatment. Some of the positions 
taken are frankly controversial, but on all 
such points it seems desirable that the unor- 
thodox point of view should be pressed. 
Education in general is ruled too much by 
tradition, and the agricultural colleges, of 
all academic institutions, should be free to 
take the radical course wherever tradition is 
called in question. The agricultural col- 
lege is, from the nature of the case, a radi- 
cal, not a traditional, institution. 

Every college teacher or administrator 
should consider these questions with an open 
Tiind ; and if there are some whose minds are 
not open, why a little dynamite is the plain 
prescription. 

Frank A. Waugh. 

Massachusetts Agricultural College, 1916. 

xi 



PROGRAM 



1. Purposes and Ideals. 

2. College Organization. 

3. Physical and Financial Problems. 

4. Organization of Instruction. 

5. Specialization in Agriculture. 

6. Course of Study — Materials. 

7. Course of Study — Arrangement. 

8. Methods of Teaching. 

9. Extension Teaching. 

10. The Experiment Station. 

11. Special Problems and Methods. 



Xlll 



CHAPTER I 
PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

IN ORDER to reach any intelligent 
notion of the methods to be pursued in 
teaching agriculture, horticulture and do- 
mestic arts, it is obligatory to determine first 
what are the purposes and ideals of such 
teaching. Much of the misunderstanding 
which prevails in this field is due solely to 
a lack of agreement in purpose, and much 
discussion is rendered futile by a failure to 
define clearly the ideals of agricultural edu- 
cation. Such a definition, however, is not 
especially difficult. 

The most cursory study discloses the fact 
that there are two main purposes in the 
minds of those who conduct the schools, 
high schools and colleges of agriculture and 
courses in domestic arts. The first of these 
is the purpose of vocational training; the 
second is the purpose of personal human 
culture. In the minds of different men 
these purposes are variously combined and 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

modified, yet they seldom lose their specific 
character. 

The former purpose, to train the young 
man or young woman for a vocation or pro- 
fession (it is sometimes nicer to call farming 
and home-making professions), has obvi- 
ously been the distinctive, creative and 
determining idea in the public mind. Per- 
sonal culture was always sufficiently avail- 
able in other schools. It must be recognized, 
without the slightest qualification, that the 
men who created these schools and appro- 
priated public funds to their support did so 
primarily for the promotion of vocational 
training. It would seem a necessary Infer- 
ence from this fact that, whatever emphasis 
in particular schools may be given to the 
ideals of personal culture, this emphasis 
must not obscure nor seriously interfere with 
the primary purpose. 

The second purpose, that of personal de- 
velopment, is by no means negligible, how- 
ever. This ideal, sometimes spoken of as 
culture, sometimes as personal character de- 
velopment, sometimes as the development of 
humanitarian impulses, sometimes as prep- 

2 



PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

aration for citizenship, is of vital impor- 
tance to the pupil and to the state. A full, 
rich, efficient life is more valuable to the 
individual than pecuniary success in a voca- 
tion; and a generous serviceable citizenship 
is more valuable to the state than proficiency 
in growing corn or making cheese. 

The mere statement of these ideals, how- 
ever, does not by any means exhaust this part 
of the subject. The interpretation of these 
ideals into the primary terms of educational 
policy is of vital significance; and it is pre- 
cisely at this point that the most radical 
divergencies occur. 

IDEALS OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 

Training for the agricultural and home- 
making professions may be given in a va- 
riety of ways. While these are considered in 
detail in Chapter VII, we may notice here 
in passing that the two methods now most 
prominently discussed are the scientific and 
the technical. The former proceeds on the 
assumption that science is able to explain 
and illuminate all the multitudinous details 

3 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

of practice. Many sober persons claim in- 
deed that it is the only key to practice. 
From such premises it is argued that the 
proper training for agricultural vocations is 
based upon and chiefly consists of training in 
the sciences. 

The latter plan of technical training be- 
lieves first in "learning by doing." It be- 
lieves that the educational process is more 
natural and effective when it proceeds from 
manual experience and personal observation 
to scientific generalization instead of mov- 
ing in the opposite direction. It therefore 
bases its scheme of instruction on observa- 
tion and practice instead of on science. 

Whenever these two ideals can be clearly 
defined they meet in a head-on collision. 
The constant compromise of the tvvo in the 
schools and colleges today proves chiefly the 
vagueness of educational ideals and the com- 
mon and inexcusable neglect of pedagogic 
principles. 

IDEALS OF CULTURE 

Just at present, however, we need to give 
more particular thought to the ideals of cul- 

4 



PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

ture which should never be absent from the 
educational policy. We can afford to give 
the subject this special attention because we 
shall not discuss it in detail in any other 
connection. 

Men's ideas of culture are exceedingly 
diverse, but when driven home they all come 
to two principal conclusions; first, the de- 
velopment of personal character for per- 
sonal satisfaction; and second, efficiency in 
service to society. Emphasis upon the sec- 
ond factor is comparatively recent. 

When one looks upon education from the 
point of view of developing one's personal 
resources in life — cultivating one's field of 
personal enjoyment — it should be clear that 
different people enjoy different things — 
even cultured people. Men who have found 
their own pleasures chiefly in books natu- 
rally emphasize bookish culture; and as 
these men have a wide hearing in the world 
and a large influence in the institutions of 
learning, this idea of culture as something 
coming chiefly from books has had a very 
wide currency. It has received notice out 
of all proportion to its value. 

5 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

It is easy to observe that many men find 
their daily enjoyments largely in the com- 
pany of other men. This fact has led, in 
recent times, to considerable stress on the 
social qualities of culture. 

Without stopping to characterize other 
ideas of personal culture, let it be quite 
clear that the man of agricultural vocation 
has wide and adequate and satisfying sources 
of enjoyment in other fields. He has the 
joy of accomplishment in his calling, which 
for most men in most vocations of life is one 
of the deepest satisfactions of daily expe- 
rience. Then he has ever before him the 
infinitely varied and infinitely interesting 
phenomena of nature. With these he comes 
into a very intimate and benign contact. He 
lives with and is a part of the immeasurable 
beauties of the fields, the landscape and the 
sky. These all speak to him in a language 
which he understands quite as well as any- 
one understands the languages of past civili- 
zations. 

Let us turn now to the ideals of citizen- 
ship, which may be more clearly stated as 
efficient service to society, that is, to the com- 

6 



PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

munity and the state. This thought has ob- 
viously been well to the front with those 
who have pressed for education in "the 
humanities," so-called. It is quite cogently 
argued that, to be a good citizen, one must 
know something of civilization, its past, its 
ideals, its present currents; and these are to 
be gained most naturally by the study of 
languages, literature, history, economics, 
sociology and civics. Practically all edu- 
cators agree that some such training is ob- 
ligatory upon all schools, and especially 
upon colleges founded and supported by the 
state. 

VOCATION AS SERVICE 

Accepting fully the general principle 
here involved, I would point out certain 
considerations which bear an important part 
in making up the sum of education for social 
service. 

First, and of the very greatest significance, 
is the fact that each man's principal contri- 
bution to the general welfare, i. e., his chief 
social service, lies precisely in his vocation. 

7 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

This far outweighs all else. The common 
man works at his vocation (for the good of 
society) with all his energy and enthusiasm 
six days in the week, and perfunctorily 
teaches a Sunday School class for thirty 
minutes on Sunday. The most vicious mis- 
take that can be made is to assume that the 
Sunday School class represents his social 
service, while his week's work on his farm is 
wholly for his own selfish benefit. 

This perfectly damnable assumption is 
constantly made, however, in the churches 
and oftener in the colleges. It is often said 
that the presence of "purely utilitarian" — 
that is professional — subjects in the curricu- 
lum makes it necessary to offset their effect 
by large doses of "humanitarian" or "cul- 
tural" subjects. This whole line of argu- 
ment is at once the most evil and the most 
fallacious ever brought into the discussion 
of educational questions. 

I speak here, not from pedagogic theory, 
but from long, personal experience. In this 
matter I am able to add my own college ex- 
perience to twenty years of intimate associa- 
tion with college students, the great majority 

8 



PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

of whom were following courses in which 
professional studies were combined with a 
liberal allowance of the approved cultural 
subjects. In considering the value of this 
testimony it should be borne in mind that, 
during the past twenty years, the cultural 
subjects have nearly always been much bet- 
ter taught and their cultural value much 
better presented than the professional sub- 
jects. Yet any teacher who has thought- 
fully observed students of this sort will have 
been fully convinced that the great majority 
of them "find themselves" in their profes- 
sional subjects. Here their imaginations 
are awakened, here life begins to have a 
meaning, and (what is the precise point) 
life seems larger and less self-centered. 

And so I argue, with all possible empha- 
sis, that, for the purposes of culture, profes- 
sional subjects are more effective in the edu- 
cational program than the conventional 
'Cultural" subjects. They do more for both 
phases of culture — more to open the pupil's 
way to a satisfying contact with his own en- 
vironment, and more to develop in him the 
impulses of altruism. Not only do the pro- 

9 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

fessional (vocational) studies fix these tend- 
encies, but they offer the best possible outlet 
for those tendencies. 

The humanitarianism of the classic 
studies is apt to be wholly academic and 
reflective. The humanitarianism of the vo- 
cational studies is likely to be practical and 
active. 

This argument is not designed to throw 
discredit upon the classic studies, which will 
always have a commanding value for some 
men; but simply to controvert the common 
and wholly iniquitous idea that the profes- 
sional studies have no cultural value and 
must therefore be supplemented by extensive 
courses in languages, literature, history, etc. 

CULTURE AND THE TEACHER 

Necessarily it follows from this argument 
that the vocational subjects should be taught 
with their cultural values in mind. The 
teacher should present this phase of his work 
with enthusiasm; and as culture, so far as it 
is a product of school or college work, is 
after all very much more a matter of teacher 

lO 



PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

than of subject, it is of first importance to 
secure the proper teacher. 

But even the most rigidly technical 
courses need a bush. It is possible (though 
at present it very rarely occurs) for the stu- 
dent to specialize too closely. He should 
get a broad outlook on life — the broader the 
better — and for this purpose should study as 
many subjects as practicable outside his pro- 
fessional field. Here economics, sociology 
and history seem to have chief value. Some 
science not definitely required in the chosen 
vocation may w^ell be included. Languages, 
ancient or modern, as commonly taught, 
have very little cultural value and no prac- 
tical application whatever. 

In the case of any particular student, howr- 
ever, facing the problem of making out his 
course of study in some particular school, it 
will always be better to choose teachers 
rather than subjects. For, as we have al- 
ready said, teachers count for more than 
subjects — much more! It will then be de- 
sirable to find some variety amongst one's 
teachers — to elect some who have the most 
approved classical culture, some who are 

II 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

bookish, some who are alive with the ideas 
of current politics, occasionally one who is 
deadly dull but impeccably sound, perhaps 
one who is athletic or sporty. Association 
with real live men in many fields is the best 
of all curricula for the development of per- 
sonal outlook or inlook. As far as any col- 
lege can give culture this is where it will be 
found. 

SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 

Summarizing the arguments of this chap- 
ter we may say: 

I The agricultural schools and colleges 
follow two main purposes: (a) to give tech- 
nical (vocational, professional, practical) 
training, (b) to give personal development 
in character, sometimes called culture. 

2. The former purpose is the primary 
one, and must never be obscured by the 
other, no matter how important the second 
may appear to be. 

3. There are two principal methods of 
providing the technical training. The first 
offers a broad foundation of science upon 

12 



PURPOSES AND IDEALS 

which it is expected a superstructure of 
technic can be built. The second begins 
with observation and practice and calls 
upon science for necessary explanations. 
The two methods are essentially antithetical, 
but are often confused in current teaching. 
The former has been the commoner in the 
past, but is pedagogically and practically in- 
ferior to the second. 

4. Culture aims at two principal objects: 
(a) personal development for personal satis- 
faction, (b) personal service to society. 
Both these objects are reached to a large ex- 
tent in purely technical training. They can 
be much more fully met when technical 
training is alive to these opportunities. 
But these purely technical studies should 
be supplemented by a broad outlook on 
other fields, particularly science, economics 
and sociology. 



13 



CHAPTER II 
COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

UNDER the stimulus of federal appro- 
priations therehas now been organized 
in each state of the United States and in each 
province of Canada an agricultural college. 
These institutions usually include depart- 
ments devoted to research and to extension 
work, as well as faculties especially organ- 
ized for college teaching. In a number of 
southern states it has been found expedient 
to establish two colleges, one for whites and 
one for negroes, but with this exception 
there appears to be no adequate reason for 
any division of the grants; and in general it 
seems to be fully proven by experience that 
each state will be much better served by one 
strong central institution directing affairs in 
agriculture and home economics than by two 
or more smaller colleges. 

Several years ago there was warm discus- 
sion as to whether these special interests 

H 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

could best be served by a separate agricul- 
tural college or by an agricultural school 
organized in a state university. Today this 
controversy has hardly more than historic 
interest. The question has been variously 
decided in different states, always with ref- 
erence to local political conditions and ac- 
complished facts, never with respect to 
academic principles. Wherever the ques- 
tion may be opened again it will always be 
possible to show advantages and disadvan- 
tages on either side. Certainly conditions 
are so different in different states and prov- 
inces that no one form of organization is 
possible for all. Massachusetts Agricul- 
tural College and Ontario Agricultural 
College, which are purely agricultural, have 
their problems much simplified by their 
singleness of aim. On the other hand, the 
great universities, like Wisconsin and Illi- 
nois, have demonstrated their ability to pro- 
vide for the agricultural needs of their states 
without difficulty or prejudice. 

A related problem has come to the fore in 
a few states in recent years. It has usually 
emerged in the form of a proposition to con- 

15 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

solidate two or more existing state educa- 
tional institutions, though sometimes the 
legislation urged has contemplated only the 
consolidation of the engineering schools, 
the agricultural schools, or the work in do- 
mestic economy of two separate institutions. 
Montana, Kansas and Iowa may be men- 
tioned at random and without prejudice as 
states in which this scheme has risen to the 
hight of a real issue in recent times. 

One argument is pressed forward before 
all others in support of these plans, viz, 
economy. It is roundly asserted to be a 
great waste of public money to duplicate in 
two or three colleges in the same state the 
expensive equipment needed for instruction 
in engineering or agriculture; and when- 
ever a merger of two or more whole institu- 
tions is advocated economies are promised 
all along the line. It is said that one library 
takes the place of all, that the entire college 
plant of one college will answer for all — 
and similar economies are foreseen in per- 
sonnel and in the work of administration. 

All this sounds convincing, at least until 
one begins to look up accomplished facts. 

i6 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

If this line of argument were generally 
sound it would follow that the cost of in- 
struction and administration would fall, 
pari passu, as each college or university 
grows in size. The cost for each student 
should be proportionately lower in large 
universities than in small colleges. But it is 
a notorious fact that this never happens. If 
anything, the reverse is true. Experience, 
therefore, offers no foundation for the ex- 
pectation that a consolidation of institutions 
will decrease the cost of maintenance. 

It seems a fair criticism, however, to re- 
mark that many state institutions have in- 
vited these troubles by extravagant equip- 
ment and over-organization. It is more than 
doubtful whether the enormous and expen- 
sive plants now collected in many places 
have any proper justification in honest peda- 
gogy. It may well be believed that plainer 
furnishings and scantier equipment would 
yield better results in manhood and woman- 
hood — the more certainly so if the difference 
in cost of materials could be spent for 
stronger teachers. 

There are yet other reasons, moreover, for 

17 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

questioning the wisdom of the consolidation 
propaganda. Without reference to cost per 
pupil it is frequently said, and widely be- 
lieved, that undergraduate students fare bet- 
ter in the small college than in the large one. 
Contacts are more direct, responsibilities 
plainer, instruction more intimate, and the 
results generally better. This principle, 
widely accepted, would point to segregation 
of units into more and smaller institutions 
instead of toward consolidation into fewer 
and larger universities. 

Further than this is to be considered the 
value of localized college work. Any insti- 
tution attracts the bulk of its students from 
the immediate vicinity. It is easy to show 
that the majority of pupils, even in great 
and famous colleges, come from within a 
very short radius. For this reason, also, sev- 
eral smaller colleges in several parts of a 
lar^e state are more serviceable than one 
big central cyclopean university. In the big 
western states particularly, where the con- 
solidation idea has been most frequently 
urged, it would seem that real colleges are 
still too few and too far apart. 

i8 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

Consolidation of management under a 
single board of administration, as is now 
being tried in Kansas and other states, seems 
to have few valid objections and some mate- 
rial advantages. Perhaps this offers the best 
line of compromise and of development. 

THE TRUSTEES 

'All these Institutions are alike In deriving 
their principal income from federal and 
state (or provincial) grants. While the fed- 
eral appropriations are a very substantial 
part of the income of most institutions, the 
institutions are nearly always managed and 
the funds spent by boards of trustees ap- 
pointed solely by the state, and subject only 
to certain mild inspections from federal of- 
ficers. On the whole, this system has proved 
practical and satisfactory, and seems to rest 
upon a basis of sound public policy. 

A few instances still exist, however. In 
which the institutions designated as bene- 
ficiaries of federal and state funds are man- 
aged by boards appointed in whole or in 
part from private sources. It is very gener- 

19 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

ally understood, however, that, as a matter 
of public policy, this is wholly indefensible. 
It may be laid down as a sound principle, 
without exception, that state or federal funds 
should be granted only to institutions wholly 
under public control. 

>. The trustees of these state colleges or uni- 
versities are usually appointed by the gov- 
ernors of the several states. This is the sat- 
isfactory and theoretically the best way. 
It has sometimes been proposed to elect 
them by popular vote, like congressmen or 
members of the legislature; but present 
tendencies toward shorter ballots, and the 
formation of state governments more in the 
commission form of centralized authority, 
are against such a method of naming uni- 
versity trustees. 

Objection has often been made to the 
method of naming trustees by gubernatorial 
appointment on the ground that it opens the 
way to political traflRc. While this is always 
true, and while there have been many no- 
torious cases in point in the past, the situa- 
tion is rapidly and notably improving. 
Furthermore, it may fairly be doubted 

20 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

whether any other method of naming 
trustees would have greatly changed results 
in those states where the worst political 
abuses have occurred. On the whole, ap- 
pointment by the governor seems to be gen- 
erally the best way of making up a govern- 
ing board for any state institution. 

It goes without saying that much depends 
on the personnel of this board of trustees (or 
regents). They should be men and women 
of unimpeachable character, of sound judg- 
ment, and of experience in public affairs. 
Some of them ought to be farmers, some col- 
lege graduates and some chosen from other 
walks of life. Once a man has shown an in- 
terest in a particular college and the ability 
to serve effectively, he should be given prac- 
tically a life tenure of the office by reap- 
pointment. Continuous touch with the af- 
fairs of the institution and long experience 
in the work are invaluable. 

THE COLLEGE PRESIDENT 

The college president occupies an anom- 
alous position in American college organi- 
21 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

zations, being often a member, both of the 
board of trustees and of the college board of 
instruction or faculty. This position has 
been justified by results in a surprisingly 
large number of cases, considering how es- 
sentially bad it is. All the tendencies of 
recent times have been toward great central- 
ization of executive power. In this the uni- 
versities have merely followed the same trail 
as the big industrial organizations ; and dur- 
ing the period when the universities have 
been making their enormous growth almost 
wholly in material equipment and financial 
resources, this autocratic direction has had 
the justification of efficiency. It is, how- 
ever, wholly foreign to the essential nature 
and proper atmosphere of the university, 
which should be purely democratic, and it 
is subject to so many limitations, even to 
thoroughly respectable abuses, that the sys- 
tem ought to be changed. It is as yet impos- 
sible to say just what the working relation- 
ships ought to be. The situation must de- 
velop considerably further before that will 
be possible. The writer is willing, how- 
ever, to offer the opinion that the president 

22 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

should not be a member of the board of 
trustees. The fact that the president him- 
self is the employee of the same board sug- 
gests at least the ethical impropriety of his 
position. 

It is also not without significance that the 
great German universities have attained 
their world-wide influence with an organi- 
zation in which no such an officer as a col- 
lege president is known, while the univer- 
sities of Great Britain are almost equally 
innocent of any central executive authority. 
It is fair to guess that the monarchial form 
of university government has reached its 
zenith in America, and that from the pres- 
ent it will gradually decline. 

It is an open question whether the college 
president should be a member of the faculty 
or not, sitting and voting with them. Prob- 
ably he should not be; and if he is also a 
member of the board of trustees he certainly 
should not be. This whole question, how- 
ever, is of little practical interest in view of 
accomplished facts. 

In universities where the agricultural or- 
ganization forms one of many schools, the 

23 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

head of the agricultural school, usually 
called the dean, occupies practically the 
same position as the president of the inde- 
pendent agricultural college. He is not 
handicapped, however, by being a member 
of the board of trustees. 

THE FACULTY 

Traditionally the faculty is the governing 
body of the college and the embodiment of 
all power. Practically it is a negligible 
congress of unorganized whims and preju- 
dices. Its status in different colleges, of 
course, varies enormously. In some it has 
preserved its dignity and reputation; in 
some it has retained vestiges of its earlier 
powers; in some it is plainly obsolescent; in 
some it has no sound parliamentary organi- 
zation, no charter of rights nor bill of re- 
sponsibilities nor constitution of govern- 
ment. 

Business affairs are almost wholly and 

universally transferred from the faculty to 

safer hands. The necessary administrative 

duties are largely parceled out to com- 

24 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

mittees or to special executive officers, which 
committees and officers are practically never 
appointed by the faculty, even when they 
are chosen from the faculty. 

The one field in which a majority of fac- 
ulties still hold sway is the curriculum. It 
is still considered necessary for the course of 
study to be made up by legislative perform- 
ance of the faculty. This is curious, espe- 
cially in view of the fact that this is pre- 
cisely the field in which the faculty is most 
utterly helpless and worse than useless. The 
preparation of a course of study is a compli- 
cated and very difficult problem in peda- 
gogical engineering. But there is hardly 
one member of any agricultural faculty who 
knows the most elementary principles of 
pedagogics. Each man has been chosen to 
his position because he was an expert in 
market gardening, or in soil physics, or in 
dairying, or in sanitation. Not one in a hun- 
dred of these men has ever had the slightest 
training in teaching nor the simplest intro- 
duction to the fundamental principles of 
education. 

It has often been observed that the whole 

25 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

idea of such men when engaged in making a 
course of study is to have all their own 
courses put in the required list. What be- 
comes of the other subjects is no concern of 
theirs; and what becomes of the curriculum 
itself is equally a matter of indifference. 

It seems clear that the old-fashioned no- 
tion of the faculty as a democratic legislative 
body ought to be abandoned. The adminis- 
trative work of the college should be done 
by special officers specially trained for those 
duties. Matters which require investigation 
or deliberation should be sent to small, com- 
pact, working committees; and the findings 
of these committees should usually become 
operative upon approval by the dean or 
president, rather than after review by the 
faculty. The course of study, which is the 
largest and most vital of such problems, 
ought to be committed to a small board of 
experts. Minor changes which are neces- 
sary from term to term ought to be approved 
by this board, then by the president. 

In any growing institution the curriculum 
ought to be thoroughly restudied from time 
to time, at most once in ten years. When- 
26 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

ever any radical changes are to be made the 
local board of specialists, more or less 
trained in the problems of education, should 
be supplemented or wholly superseded by 
genuine educational experts from quite out- 
side the college organization. If any man 
were designing a bridge across the Missis- 
sippi River, would he leave his plans to a 
committee of fifty, no one of whom had ever 
studied bridge construction, but some of 
whom were genuine experts in floriculture 
or physiological chemistry or French? Yet 
that is the method widely followed in de- 
signing college curricula. It is small won- 
der that the result is the laughing stock of 
the community. 

DEPARTMENT ORGANIZATION 

In practically all colleges the unit of or- 
ganization is the department. It is by all 
odds the most important unit. A good col- 
lege organization in fact consists of just two 
things; a series of strong, aggressive, effec- 
tive departments with some central power of 
co-ordination. This central co-ordinating 
27 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

power will naturally determine very largely 
the policies of the institution. 

A good college department consists of a 
good man plus a reasonable equipment, 
these two factors having a relative value of 
about ten to one. When an able man has 
been secured to lead a certain line of work 
the proper organization of his department 
should be very simple — the simpler the bet- 
ter. It is necessary merely to insure the 
independence of the man, that is, to give 
him full control of his department. In 
fields where considerable equipment is re- 
quired, especially land and buildings, and 
where productive enterprises are in prog- 
ress, it is essential that these shall be under 
the free control of the head of the depart- 
ment The more his action is hampered by 
other officers or by committees of any sort, 
the worse it is for the college. 

The importance of this full control has 
frequently been obscured in the past — often 
quite lost to view — through the large devel- 
opment of its disadvantages. Many heads 
of agricultural or horticultural departments, 
through mistaken zeal or through pressure 
28 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

from above, have undertaken to manage 
large business affairs, perhaps under the in- 
superable handicap of committees of con- 
trol, and at the same time to teach large 
classes, carry on experimental work and give 
numberless lectures throughout the state. 
This could never be done by J. Pierpont 
Morgan, Mark Hopkins and William J. 
Bryan all rolled into one. A considerable 
number of men who have successfully man- 
aged large departments have shown how it 
can be done. Such a department adminis- 
trator retains full control of his department 
affairs, keeps in quick touch with general 
college policies, holds an open outlook on 
the outside world, and finds loyal and capa- 
ble assistants to carry on the various lines of 
work. 

In all large institutions the problem of 
correlating the work of departments now 
looms large. The difficulty is greatly em- 
phasized with the necessary subdivision of 
the old departments of agriculture and hor- 
ticulture and must soon make itself felt in 
the growth of departments of domestic econ- 
omy. When, for example, an old-time de- 
29 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

partment of horticulture divides into the 
modern departments of pomology, forestry, 
market gardening, floriculture, landscape 
gardening, etc., the question arises whether 
these new units shall continue to use the 
same old land and buildings in common, or 
whether each shall be provided with a sep- 
arate outfit. The question which thus 
promptly arises in respect to physical equip- 
ment presently makes itself felt also in the 
fields of teaching and research, and some 
scheme of harmonizing all these interests 
must be provided. 

Three principal methods of harmonizing 
the work of related departments have been 
generally tried. Naming these somewhat 
arbitrarily, we may call them the Illinois, 
the Massachusetts and the Cornell methods. 

THE ILLINOIS PLAN 

The Illinois plan consists in the formation 
of a large department with one administra- 
tive or business officer. This is the most 
natural possible line of development. As a 
department grows and new assistants be- 
30 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

come necessary each one is chosen as a spe- 
cialist. Thus a department of home eco- 
nomics will acquire expert assistants in 
invalid cookery, sanitation, house furnishing 
and decoration, etc. These assistants are 
burdened with a minimum of business af- 
fairs and administrative duties, and so are 
able to give undivided attention to their 
technical specialties. The system works 
well. 

The point has often been raised whether 
such a large and centralized department 
should add specialists for work which might 
be done by other departments. For ex- 
ample, when the agronomy department 
meets a problem in soil chemistry, shall it 
take on a chemist and put him to work, or 
shall the problem be turned over to the cen- 
tral department of chemistry? In dealing 
with problems of technical agriculture, hor- 
ticulture and domestic economy, emphati- 
cally the former practice is better. Every 
technical problem should be approached 
from its technical side. The results must be 
interpreted and the practical application 
made by the technical man. The most con- 

31 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

spicuous wastes of our American institutions 
in the past twenty years have been due to the 
opposite practice. It is worth while here to 
quote the report made in 1908 by the special 
commission on agricultural research ap- 
pointed by the Association of American Ag- 
ricultural Colleges and Experiment Sta- 
tions. One of the principal recommenda- 
tions oflfered by this able committee (Dr. 
David Starr Jordan, Dr. Carroll D. Wright, 
Dr. Henry P. Armsby, Dr. W. H. Jordan, 
Mr. Gififord Pinchot) was that ^'Whenever 
possible, the organization of research agen- 
cies should be on the basis of problems to be 
solved and not of processes used in their 
solution. In other words, the subdivisions 
of an agricultural research agency for ad- 
ministrative purposes should correspond 
with the recognized subdivisions of the sub- 
ject of agriculture itself, and not with the 
classification of the pure sciences." 

Concretely stated, this means that the re- 
search work in horticulture should be organ- 
ized as fruit growing, market gardening, 
floriculture, etc., perhaps still better in spe- 
cific projects, such as control of the San Jose 

32 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

scale, development of blight-resisting strains 
of muskmelons, or fertilizers for roses, 
rather than as entomology, botany and 
chemistry. Just the opposite practice has 
usually been followed. 

This principle, here stated in reference to 
agricultural research, is doubly important 
in agricultural teaching and triply indispen- 
sable in extension work. 

THE MASSACHUSETTS PLAN 

Similar in practice but different in theory 
is the plan first used in Massachusetts, but 
now successfully adopted in Oregon and 
elsewhere. Following this system new de- 
partments are differentiated from the old 
ones as soon as new specialties become es- 
tablished. Thus a department of agriculture 
will split up into departments of agronomy, 
live stock husbandry, poultry husbandry, 
dairy husbandry, farm engineering, farm 
administration, etc., as growth may require. 
Each new department will be given its 
autonomous existence. The specialist in 
charge will be independent, will have his 

33 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

place in the college faculty, his department 
will be on a par with others. These features 
usually prove attractive to ambitious men, 
and it seems easier, therefore, under this 
plan to hold together a number of capable 
specialists. 

But as stronger men are engaged and 
placed in positions of relative independence 
it becomes rapidly harder to preserve an ef- 
fective esprit de corps, a unity of purpose 
and action, a harmony of personal interests 
and an economical use of the physical equip- 
ment. The central feature of the Massa- 
chusetts plan is the grouping of closely re- 
lated departments into "divisions." (The 
nomenclature is unsatisfactory, but the idea 
is sound.) Each division has an adminis- 
trative officer, who is usually also the head 
of one of the unit departments, and whose 
business it is to harmonize and unify the 
interests of the group. Actually there is 
considerable difference between the duties 
of a Massachusetts head of division and the 
Illinois head of department. The Illinois 
position requires the strong, self-reliant 
business ability of the modern "captain of 

34 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

industry"; the Massachusetts job, on the 
other hand, requires chiefly a large human 
sympathy and an adroit diplomacy. The Il- 
linois method is better as a business proposi- 
tion. The Massachusetts method is better 
in developing the human resources of the 
institution. 

THE CORNELL PLAN 

A wholly different theory of organization 
has been followed, more or less consistently, 
at Cornell. Perhaps a better exemplifica- 
tion of it could be found in the United States 
Department of Agriculture. The plan here 
is to focus attention on problems or "proj- 
ects," rather than on departments, which 
should be at best merely the means of solv- 
ing problems. The purpose is to diminish 
the tendency to mere organization — the "red 
tape" into which all large organizations 
inevitably drift. There are many sad ex- 
amples of departments so wound up in their 
mechanical affairs and departmental jeal- 
ousies as to have no strength left for real 
service. 

35 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

As new problems arise under this system 
they are outlined and defined as "projects," 
and each project is assigned, not to some de- 
partment, but to some man. Even at the 
best, however, conflicts and jealousies arise; 
and the weak point in this scheme has usu- 
ally developed in the lack of a sufficiently 
strong and sympathetic central power to 
harmonize these interests and to weld them 
all into an aggressive and effective whole. 
At its best this system is superior to all 
others ; but it is very hard to supply continu- 
ously the presiding and unifying force to 
make it go. It seems to be better suited to a 
research organization than to one engaged 
chiefly in teaching. Taking into account the 
human frailties of college men and other 
practical difficulties of administration, it is 
probably safer for most institutions to at- 
tempt a less flexible organization. 

Whatever the system of organization 
adopted, the subdivision and specialization 
of subject matter is a great aid to progress. 
The rapid separation of agriculture and 
horticulture into workable component parts 
has been the most fruitful achievement of 

36 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

the past decade. Similar specialization 
should come promptly in all the larger de- 
partments of domestic economy. 

THE CENTRALIZING TENDENCY 

This seems to be the best point at which 
to discuss certain fundamental tendencies in 
organization which have been almost 
wholly overlooked in recent years. In the 
business world our time has been character- 
ized by the rapid consolidation of small con- 
cerns into larger ones, and the further merg- 
ing of these big units into trusts or conti- 
nental monopolies. The universities, which 
have made their recent phenomenal growth 
chiefly in the lines of big business, have 
freely copied the current business methods 
and have been actuated by the prevailing 
business spirit. Yet even in the business 
world men are now suspecting that this cen- 
tralizing tendency has gone too far, and are 
trying to get back to smaller units and more 
direct contacts. And if the centralizing 
tendency has gone too far in manufacturing 
and commerce, it has more obviously over- 

37 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

run its usefulness in the educational field. 
In college work simplicity of method and 
directness of contact are of paramount im- 
portance. 

It has long been observed that the famous 
men whose names grace the catalogs of the 
big universities are seldom seen by students. 
The students themselves know only a few 
small groups among their classmates, the 
others remaining as much strangers as 
though they were coolies in the plantations 
of Formosa. The intimate and infinitely 
stimulating relationships of the little old- 
fashioned college have been lost, and there 
are few experienced educators who do not 
feel that this loss has never been offset by 
any substantial gain in the new order of 
things. 

Remedial measures which have been fre- 
quently proposed have mostly been designed 
upon the theory of more organization. Ac- 
cepting the big central plant as a fixed neces- 
sity, they have proposed to form smaller 
organizations within the big one in which 
some of the old intimacy might be restored. 

This problem, which seems thus far never 

38 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

to have occurred to agricultural college 
authorities, is now imminent here also; but 
it would seem that the method of its solution 
is here much readier to hand than in general 
university administration. 

The problem, simply stated, is to combine 
the momentum of a strong central adminis- 
tration with the simplicity of the small unit 
— the business efficiency of one with the 
human efficiency of the other. In other 
words, there must be some decentralizing 
movement to balance the vast centralization 
of the past twenty years, but these centrif- 
ugal movements must come in a way not to 
destroy the good accomplished by the cen- 
tripetal movement. 

THE teacher's PROBLEM 

Now, every teacher seriously devoted to 
his students in any department of dairying 
or stock breeding or floriculture in any col- 
lege in the country — certainly in any large 
college — has long ago made up his mind 
that he could do a great deal more for his 
men if he could separate them completely 

39 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

from the ruck of college life and could go 
with them to some out-of-the-way place 
where he and they could live with the prob- 
lems they are studying. If he is teaching 
floriculture he would remove to that district 
where flowers are grown ; if he is a dairyman 
he would go to the dairy district. 

This feeling, born first from an interest in 
a professional specialty, will bear the closest 
scrutiny in the interest of the students them- 
selves as men. The whole result of such a 
separation of the student group from the big 
university is as agreeable on its human side 
as on its technical side. The scheme works. 
It has been tried and has succeeded, 
and should be widely and systematically 
adopted. The thing to be done is simply for 
the agricultural college to resolve itself into 
several camps, more or less permanent, and 
for longer or shorter periods of the year. 
The pomologists would go to the orchards, 
the foresters to the woods, the live stock stu- 
dents to the big stock farms and markets and 
the market gardeners to the best truck dis- 
tricts. Should they be obliged in these lo- 
calities to make their own camps, cook their 
40 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

own meals and provide their own sanitation, 
the educational value of their experience 
would be definitely and largely increased. 

The gang of standpatters which makes 
up the majority of nearly every college fac- 
ulty would stand aghast at such revolution- 
ary proceedings. They will quickly say it 
can't be done. But anyone who is looking 
for human results and not for the perpetua- 
tion of an old machine — anyone for whom 
men are more valuable than rules — will 
have no difficulty whatever in such an 
undertaking. Some readjustment of this 
sort is long overdue. Simplification must 
soon succeed upon centralization. 

Stated in more general terms, it would 
seem to be the best plan to combine the ad- 
vantages of central administration with per- 
sonal contacts of small units by dividing the 
student body into small groups, making the 
division on the basis of major technical sub- 
jects, placing each group in the immediate 
charge of a few good instructors, and send- 
ing these groups to various localities for 
work. At the beginning it will certainly be 
found impracticable to send all the students 

41 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

of all groups out into the field for all their 
college time. The plan is bound to be tried, 
and probably at first with upper classmen. 
Yet, theoretically at least, it is equally de- 
sirable for freshmen. Students entering 
Yale Forestry School, for example, begin by 
a summer term in the woods. It is abso- 
lutely sound doctrine, too, that an agricul- 
tural course ought to begin on the farm and 
a cookery course in the kitchen, rather than 
in the chemistry lecture room. 

At the outset these colonies of students 
will be placed principally upon private 
farms ; but it is easy to foresee the time when 
the agricultural college will have its own 
separate fruit farm, its dairy farm, its poul- 
try farm, etc., all more or less detached from 
the central plant and each located in the 
district where the particular industry is best 
developed. 

SUMMARY 

The principal points discussed in this 
chapter may be briefly recapitulated as fol- 
lows: 

42 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

1. Different forms of organization are re- 
quired in different states. While the sep- 
arate colleges of agriculture seemed at first 
to have the advantage, the large universities 
are now doing very well by their agricul- 
tural colleges. 

2. The board of trustees should be small, 
and should be made up of men and women 
of ability, who should enjoy a long tenure of 
office. 

3. Under our American systemeverything 
depends on the character of the college 
president. Unquestionably the tendency to 
concentrate all powers in this one officer has 
gone too far. In particular the common 
practice of making him a member of the 
board of trustees seems injudicious; and it 
seems better in most cases also for the presi- 
dent not to sit with the faculty, but to occupy 
toward that body a relation more like that 
of the President of the United States toward 
Congress. 

4. The traditional faculty legislature, 
however, has outlived its usefulness and 
should be abandoned. Routine administra- 
tive duties should be assigned to small com- 

43 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

mittees or to special executive officers. 
Problems like the course of study should be 
left to specialists, whose findings can be suf- 
ficiently checked by the president and 
trustees. 

5. The most important unit of college or- 
ganization is the department, and the most 
important element in the department is the 
man who heads it. Everything should be 
done to maintain the integrity of depart- 
ments and to preserve the independence and 
initiative of department heads. 

6. Correlation of departmental work Is a 
problem in every institution, and grows 
rapidly in difficulty with the growth of the 
college. Three principal methods are in 
vogue for securing such correlation. They 
are: (a) The formation of large depart- 
ments with many specialist assistants; (b) 
The grouping of related departments into 
larger divisions, headed by deans or divi- 
sion chiefs; (c) The obliteration of depart- 
ment lines and the organization of the work 
about men or problems. 

7. A very strong centralizing tendency 
has been operative in all college organlza- 

44 



COLLEGE ORGANIZATION 

tlon during the past twenty years. This has 
some important advantages, and some very 
obvious defects. A counter movement to- 
w^ard decentralization must be expected 
soon, and may be welcomed and guided so 
as to secure many of the benefits, both of the 
large and the small institutions. The sim- 
plest plan for use in agricultural colleges 
appears to be to divide the student body, 
during at least a part of the course, into sep- 
arate groups, based on the major lines of 
professional work. Such methods have al- 
ready been tried to a limited extent with 
marked success. 



45 



CHAPTER III 

PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL 
PROBLEMS 

A MODERN college is a very expen- 
sive plant. It requires a lot of money 
to run one. Probably the agricultural col- 
lege is the most expensive type of school yet 
established in considerable numbers. Prob- 
lems of raising and using money must there- 
fore be of great interest. 

There is a very general feeling that finan- 
cial problems have loomed too large during 
recent years on the horizon of many colleges. 
There has been too stressful a campaign for 
funds, in which other valuable interests 
have been neglected. Certain college presi- 
dents have been chosen chiefly for their skill 
as beggars. They have naturally given their 
strength largely to increasing endowment, 
often overlooking problems of internal de- 
velopment, of sound scholarship and of per- 
manent influence. Money is important, but 
it is not an end in itself for any self-respect- 
ing college. 

46 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 
FINANCIAL POLICY 

College finance has been seriously studied 
in many quarters. We need not try to make 
even an extended review of this part of the 
subject here. There are, however, one or 
two matters of special significance to the 
land-grant institutions which ought not to 
be passed over. 

^ First of all we may notice that these state- 
supported colleges have received very few 
gifts from the millionaires. For this we may 
be profoundly thankful. It is altogether best 
that they should remain public institutions 
in every sense of the word — supported by 
the people and beholden to no private in- 
terests. 

Secondly, we may observe that there are 
two principal methods in vogue of meeting 
the financial requirements of these colleges. 
The first is by direct special legislative ap- 
propriations, such appropriations being of 
both federal and state origin, though the 
federal appropriations (Morrill funds, 
Hatch funds, Adams funds, etc.,) usually 
continue from year to year. The second is 

47 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

by a continuing tax (usually called a "mill 
tax"), or occasionally by continuing appro- 
priations. The former method has the ad- 
vantage of requiring the institution to pass 
its plans in public review and to some extent 
to give a public accounting of results. This 
much is wholly salutary. The second 
method, however, has the great advantage of 
promoting a fixed and foresighted financial 
policy. It enables an institution to plan its 
development several years in advance. This 
can be done, too, without depriving the col- 
lege of its direct accountability to the state. 

Thirdly, we may indicate that all colleges 
should adopt the principle of the budget 
system, and should constantly study to per- 
fect the details of its application. No hap- 
hazard system of making up financial esti- 
mates should be tolerated in a public insti- 
tution. 

Lastly, it is not unfair to record the sus- 
picion that some state colleges have got their 
appropriations too easily. They have had 
more money than they knew how to use 
wisely. There have been extravagances at 
some points; and extravagance in a public 

48 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

institution is deadly. The discipline of hard 
times may be made of real value, but the 
uses of prosperity are sometimes cruel. The 
support which some states have offered to 
their colleges has been niggardly, weak, pre- 
carious or irregular. Some institutions have 
suffered sadly under such treatment. It is 
much harder, however, to find sympathy for 
those colleges which have suffered from too 
much money. 

LAND PROBLEMS 

i An agricultural college is necessarily at- 
tached to the land. It should exist on, of, 
and for the soil. Land is as natural and nec- 
essary to an agricultural college as water to 
a fish. It is a matter of wonder, therefore, 
that the pinch of the land problem has not 
been more keenly felt before now. The 
comparatively small part which this prob- 
lem has played In agricultural college 
policy up to the present time Is to be ex- 
plained only by the fact that most colleges 
have been classical or scientific schools, 
rather than agricultural Institutions. As 

49 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

agriculture comes more and more into 
prominence in them the question of land 
grows rapidly in urgency. The University 
of Illinois has recently paid $236,000 for 
320 acres of land for a single department; 
the Kansas Agricultural College has bought 
several farms near to or adjoining its orig- 
inal plant and has come into possession and 
efifective use of 4,000 acres in one block, 
w^here only farming experiments and dem- 
onstrations are conducted; all this in addi- 
tion to more than 1,500 acres in other areas; 
the Massachusetts Agricultural College is 
just now adding a tract of 735 acres to its 
holdings to be used as a laboratory for teach- 
ing forestry. These instances are clearly 
symptomatic of present conditions. 

In practically all state agricultural col- 
leges the original land allotments were 
highly accidental. Considerations of local 
politics usually determined the site, the 
choice of land distinctly suited to the work 
of the college being the last matter of atten- 
tion. Under these circumstances several of 
the state colleges have found themselves 
seriously handicapped, both as to quantity 

50 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

and quality of their land equipment. Some 
have already been forced to heroic measures 
for the correction of early mistakes; others 
have their problems yet to solve. 

Quite clearly every college which culti- 
vates an ambition for an agricultural future 
will find the land problem urgent for some 
years to come, and until our policy in the use 
of land for teaching, experiment and dem- 
onstration is much more clearly realized 
than at present. It is a matter of the greatest 
urgency at the present time that every insti- 
tution should make a thorough-going in- 
quiry into its future land needs, and into the 
policies which determine these needs. These 
policies should be brought out of the limbo 
of vague dreams into the form of clear and 
definite working plans, and in line with such 
well-studied plans every institution should 
set about the acquisition of such tracts of 
land as will Insure an unhampered develop- 
ment for the future. 

While it Is already clear that every suc- 
cessful and growing agricultural college 
will need more land — usually a great deal 
more — it is by no means so easy to say how 

51 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

that land shall be selected. The plan of 
buying all the land adjoining will rarely- 
work. Frequently the land cannot be bought 
at any price; almost as frequently it is not 
worth having at any price. It is the convic- 
tion of the writer that future purchases will 
be chiefly in the form of detached parcels 
scattered in various parts of the state to be 
served. 

This raises immediately the question of 
all detached enterprises. Up to the present 
time there has been a strong prejudice 
against them. In some institutions, unques- 
tionably, experiment station and college 
funds have been frittered away in little local 
substations, a considerable number of which 
were established principally for political 
purposes. There has been the presumption, 
also, that scattered projects could not be so 
effectively used nor so economically admin- 
istered. 

These objections, however, are not funda- 
mental. They can be eliminated by wise 
management. It is increasingly evident 
that many problems are distinctly local, in- 
asmuch as all intensive farming industries 
52 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

tend to emphatic localization. In the little 
state of Massachusetts it has been found 
necessary to develop a cranberry substation 
in the highly specialized cranberry district; 
an asparagus substation in the asparagus dis- 
trict; a detached forest tract was found to be 
the only answer to the needs of the forestry 
instruction; and a specialized outstation, 
maintained by the department of market 
gardening in the market-gardening section, 
is now projected. Every agricultural col- 
lege must get nearer to its problems ; and the 
only way to do it is to go where the problems 
exist. 

It will be observed that this migration of 
the college to the fields where its problems 
exist grows in intensity with the shift toward 
a basis of technical agriculture — which is 
precisely the central change going on in all 
progressive institutions. A chemical prob- 
lem, a bacteriological problem, even an en- 
tomological problem, can usually be solved 
in the home laboratory, with its expensive 
equipment. Problems in peach culture, 
however, or in forestry, can be solved only 
where peaches grow or forests flourish. 

S3 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

Elsewhere consideration is given to the 
conflict now emerging between the central- 
izing and the decentralizing tendencies in 
agricultural college policy. This conflict 
promises to be a large and extended affair, 
covering the whole area of college policy. 
It seems fair to predict that, while the 
former tendency may prevail in administra- 
tion and accounting, we shall see in the 
future a much wider scattering of institu- 
tional activities. This change will neces- 
sarily involve the ownership and control of 
scattered land holdings. The college land 
policy for the future must inevitably run in 
this direction. 

BUILDINGS 

The most obvious and ghastly mistakes in 
most colleges are advertised in brick and 
mortar. Of course there may be deeper and 
more serious errors of a spiritual nature, but 
they do not stare one in the face so contin- 
ually. Buildings are big and visible. For 
this very reason they are comparatively easy 
to get, so that, as a rule, with only a few ex- 
ceptions, every institution is more nearly 

54 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

equipped in buildings than any other point. 
The ease with which legislatures and men 
of wealth give buildings to colleges and the 
difficulty with which they give money for 
maintenance or salaries have often been sor- 
rowfully compared. So it has been inev- 
itable that a good many colleges have gone 
astray in their building programs. 

More often, perhaps, in their lack of pro- 
gram. One huge and ugly building after 
another has been erected while the money 
was coming. To sit down quietly and think 
and to make a coherent, logical, artistic, bus- 
inesslike building program for the future 
has been impossible. In many cases, appar- 
ently, even the thought of such a program 
has not crossed the campus borders. 

Yet the time has now come when three 
good men can make a very good plan for the 
physical development of any college. The 
first man must be the college administrator, 
who knows the spiritual college — who 
knows the life within, which should deter- 
mine the physical form — and who has the 
vision to forecast the growth of the institu- 
tion in hand. The second should be the 
55 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

architect — a man who knows building prob- 
lems in the large — not merely an estimator 
of brick and plumbing. The third should 
be the landscape architect, who can assemble 
buildings into groups, who can manage the 
approaches and the circulation of traffic, 
who can provide the necessary open spaces 
and the backgrounds of lawn, trees and land- 
scape. This committee can render the most 
important service which it is possible to give 
to the physical plant. Their plans must be 
widely studied and criticized by others, and 
revised in the light of abundant suggestions ; 
but a critical, comprehensive, physical plan 
prepared by experts is, in its field, the first 
and greatest need of every college. Any in- 
stitution which is running without such a 
plan should proceed forthwith, through 
prayer and fasting and months of hard 
study, to supply the lack. 

Such a study will yield, amongst other 
benefits (a) a proper grouping of buildings, 
enhancing their artistic efifect and their 
practical utility; (b) a consistent style of 
architecture, now disgracefully lacking on 
many campuses; (c) a provision for the con- 
S6 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

venient circulation of traffic; (d) the reser- 
vation of open spaces which, in the lack of a 
plan, are continually sacrificed for the ex- 
pedient location of some ill-considered 
building; (e) the development of a sense of 
unity; (f) substantial financial economies, 
especially in preventing sad and expensive 
mistakes. 

Examination of the usual college campus 
reveals flagrant building errors of two sorts ; 
first, in the location of buildings — errors due 
to lack of a ground plan — and second, in 
the use of diverse and incongruous architec- 
tural styles — often freak styles and build- 
ings of no style whatever — wholly nonde- 
script and alien to every form of civilization. 
Serious blunders have been made, too, in the 
erection of buildings unsuited to the college 
needs. Though this case is harder to prove 
and is seldom admitted by college authori- 
ties, still there need be no surprise at the fact 
considering how rapidly and blindly we 
have all been experimenting in our college 
work. If we have not yet found out what 
subjects we are going to teach nor how we 
are going to teach them, it can hardly be 

57 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

expected that we shall have designed our 
buildings in every instance exactly to fit the 
unknown need. The situation ought to be 
frankly faced and corrected as fast as pos- 
sible; by which I mean, not as fast as we can 
get the money, but as fast as we can develop 
the ideas. We need ideas much more than 
money in building up an agricultural col- 
lege; and at no point does this principle ap- 
ply more forcibly than in the matter of 
buildings. 

In all probability the future will show that 
in the last decade we have erred in build- 
ing too large. Our typical teaching build- 
ing is an architectural hybrid between a 
shirt factory and a Carnegie library. Look- 
ing at our dormitories a visitor would be 
wholly uncertain whether this is a college, a 
lunatic asylum or a home for Inebriates. 
The dormitories in all these institutions have 
all the same hard, inhuman, institutional 
look, except that the tuberculosis hospitals 
and the homes for drug wrecks are leading 
the colleges in the use of cozy cottage dormi- 
tories in place of the ugly and immoral 
traditional jail type. Certainly college stu- 

58 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

dents ought to live in a more human, home- 
like way during these most critical years of 
all. It is a well-known scandal that some 
agricultural colleges have provided better 
for their pigs than for their pupils. 

While the best college thought is turning 
strongly, even though wistfully and w^ith un- 
necessary doubts, toward the smaller dormi- 
tories, it is not so generally felt that the big 
factory-like buildings are unadapted to the 
needs of college teaching, research and ad- 
ministration. Here again we are doubtless 
misled by the current tendencies toward cen- 
tralization, toward big units of organization 
and toward the glamour of big business. But 
a college is not a steel trust nor a typewriter 
factory, where endless machines, human and 
metallic, run an endless routine. A college 
ought to be a broad democracy in which 
scores of departments preserve their own in- 
valuable unity of character, and where hun- 
dreds of men in their own integrity freely 
express themselves. The modern method of 
forcing forty unrelated departments into a 
million-dollar palace may provide glorious 
laboratories for a few and sumptuous offices 

59 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

for all, but it inevitably builds up the factory 
spirit and cramps the free initiative of of- 
ficers who should first be men on their own 
feet. This spiritual injury is emphatic and 
serious in many cases. The plain and simple 
remedy is to build much smaller, simpler, 
detached or semi-detached buildings. The 
ideal arrangement, perhaps, is to supply one 
individual building for each department, 
though, of course, this rule cannot be fol- 
lowed very strictly. 

Picturing the physical college as a whole, 
I like to see it as a model village, made up of 
small, comfortable, homelike, detached 
buildings, some for residence, some for busi- 
ness, some for work, some for social greet- 
ing, recreation and worship. All should be 
simple, dignified, democratic and suited to 
the day's work. It is a very different pic- 
ture from the one that meets the visitor on 
most modern campuses where the crowded 
and splendid piles of masonry give the effect 
of a great Imperial Institution. Person- 
ally, I have a deep belief in the spirit of the 
college; and I believe that a truly living and 
effective spirit must express itself in physi- 
60 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

cal forms. This is why I demur to the mod- 
ern building program. I hope that the 
college spirit is one of democracy, of sim- 
plicity, of service, and not the spirit of com- 
bination, of imperialism and of luxury. And 
so, instead of being thrilled at the grand big 
buildings, with marble columns, of which 
our agricultural colleges boast, I find myself 
sad with misgivings. Most profoundly do I 
hope that the next few years, with more rad- 
ical consideration of these questions, will 
bring a sound reform. 

EQUIPMENT 

Many circumstances have conspired to 
over-emphasize the science work as 
compared with the technical and purely 
agricultural work in all agricultural col- 
leges. These circumstances need not be 
reviewed here, but the compound mi- 
croscope may fairly be mentioned as a 
typical disease. Without impugning any- 
body's good intentions it is fair to say 
that the compound microscope has been one 
of the most serious handicaps which agricul- 

6i 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

tural education has had to carry. Imagina- 
tion could hardly suggest anything less ap- 
ropos to a professional training in floricul- 
ture or fruit growing or general farming, 
yet the students in all such subjects have 
spent months on end with these fascinating 
instruments. Every bright boy of college 
age is naturally attracted by instruments of 
precision; and the mere fact that those in- 
struments have nothing whatever to do with 
his profession is small concern of his. But 
it should be the large concern of his teach- 
ers. Yet the teachers, too, have listened to 
the same siren. With all humility I remem- 
ber that when I equipped my first depart- 
ment of horticulture the very first thing I 
bought was a set of compound microscopes. 
Students and teachers alike, in the techni- 
cal departments of agriculture, horticulture 
and household economics, have been infatu- 
ated with the big laboratories and the beau- 
tiful apparatus of the science departments, 
and have exerted themselves endlessly to se- 
cure the same sort of equipment for them- 
selves. One may fairly suspect that a good 
many of the science departments have been 
62 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

over-equipped — that the provision of ma- 
chinery has quite outrun the equipment of 
brains — that the apparatus has been a great 
deal more refined than the men who tried to 
use it. But in the technical departments we 
need have no suspicions — we know. We 
know that a department of horticulture out- 
fitted chiefly with compound microscopes is 
teaching a very poor brand of botany in 
place of a live line of modern horticulture. 
We know that a department of animal hus- 
bandry which emphasizes a fully developed 
chemical laboratory is substituting a super- 
ficial course in physiological chemistry for 
real work in stock feeding. 

Simpler and cheaper equipment would be 
a great improvement in many science de- 
partments, perhaps in a majority of them. 
It is only ridiculous to see every sophomore 
outfitted with instruments and accessories 
which only an expert could use — with bet- 
ter equipment very often than the greatest 
discoverers have used in their epoch-making 
experiments. If pupils could improvise 
some of their own equipment and could 
overcome some difficulties it would stand 

63 



i THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

more to their education than to have all con- 
tingencies so amply foreseen by the teacher 
and the instrument vendor. 

In the technical departments the prob- 
lems of equipment are very different, or at 
least they will be as soon as these depart- 
ments find themselves. When they discover 
that they have something of their own to 
teach, and have done stealing the matter and 
aping the methods of the science depart- 
ments, they will be able to give up their 
chemical laboratories and their compound 
microscopes and to find something very dif- 
ferent in their room. 

We are now at a point where we can just 
begin to see what the future equipment of 
these technical departments is to be. A de- 
partment of animal husbandry will require 
a representative collection of animals of the 
principal breeds; it will require to have 
them housed and kept according to modern 
farm methods ; it will require whatever land 
and buildings are necessary to this end. A 
department of farm crops will require land 
on which to grow, in fields of reasonable 
size, all the commercially important crops; 
6^ 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

it will usually maintain sample plots of the 
unimportant crops; it will have separate 
fields which can be used for experimental 
purposes ; and it will have the barns, storage 
houses, seed rooms, etc., incident to the field 
work. A department of pomology will have 
orchards and nurseries producing the prin- 
cipal fruits in quantities sufficient for class 
use, and area enough for class work in prun- 
ing and spraying; it will have a suitable 
storage plant for fruit; it will have separate 
grounds for experimental work. Other de- 
partments will be developed in like manner. 
Emphasis will be placed on the fields, the 
crops, the farm animals. As these happen 
to be the very things emphasized in the 
farmer's mind by the daily routine of his 
business, the education thus given will be a 
much more truly agricultural training than 
anything we have achieved in the past. Any- 
thing except what has been done by a few 
especially progressive teachers. There are 
always a few leaders who are far enough in 
advance to show the rest of us the way. 

Household economics has its own prob- 
lems of equipment somewhat like those of 

65 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

agriculture and horticulture, but also some- 
what different. There is visible in some 
quarters the same tendency to build chemi- 
cal laboratories rather than practical kitch- 
ens, and to install thermostats, steam steri- 
lizers, bacterial culture apparatus and 
microtomes. Doubtless the most serious 
difficulty is the pressure toward institutional 
equipment and institutional methods in 
place of typical home equipment and do- 
mestic methods. Unfortunately, the college 
is an institution and not a home. Perhaps 
when we get a more highly decentralized 
and individualized organization, when we 
get cottage dormitories in place of barracks, 
we can bring in the simpler and better meth- 
ods. Perhaps each cottage dormitory can 
have its own menage, can maintain its own 
domestic kitchen and laundry, can study its 
own dietaries and make its own menus, and 
thus can constitute a more effective labora- 
tory for home economics than anything now 
possible where colleges are operated on the 
factory plan. 

The ambitious head of a department will 
naturally seek elaborate equipment for his 
66 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

work, but the thoughtful teacher must see 
that, in the teaching process, material equip- 
ment is a highly incidental feature, and that 
too much machinery positively deflects the 
student's attention from vital issues and 
actually impedes the main line of march. 

SUMMARY 

In this chapter attention has been called 
to the following matters : 

1. Agricultural colleges receive their 
funds in various ways; by federal appropri- 
ation, by grants from state legislatures, by 
direct taxes, very rarely by gifts. The major 
portion of the income is usually in the form 
of continuing appropriations. Careful 
study of financial needs, preparation of an- 
nual budgets and careful accounting are 
much to be desired. 

2. Land is indispensable to an agricul- 
tural college, and the needs of the future 
will doubtless be greater than of the past. 

3. Every college should make a critical 
study of its future land needs, based upon 
equally critical studies of future policy. 

67 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

4. Detached tracts of land will probably 
be required much oftener in the future than 
in the past. 

5. Buildings are essential andtheproblems 
connected with their design, location, group- 
ing and management are manifold. Great 
mistakes have been made everywhere in the 
matter of buildings, most of which mistakes 
can be avoided in the future by foresighted 
studies of building needs. These studies 
should reach the stage of presenting definite 
policies, with general architectural motifs 
and groupings. 

6. Similar studies should be made of the 
entire physical plant — ground, roads, build- 
ings and all other features. 

7. Probably we shall find that good build- 
ing policy will lead to the erection of 
smaller and simpler buildings in the future 
than in the recent past. The tendency 
toward very large, factory-like structures 
has evidently gone too far. Such buildings 
are objectionable in many ways and have 
very meager advantages. 

8. It is possible that the ideal layout will 
resemble to a considerable extent the usual 

68 



PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS 

rural village with its streets, open spaces, 
dwellings, business houses and public build- 
ings in simple and convenient arrangement. 

9. Circumstances have led to many seri- 
ous faults in equipment. A principal error 
lies in copying the agricultural and horticul- 
tural equipment from the science depart- 
ments. 

10. Simpler equipment should be the 
policy in most lines, including the science 
departments. 

11. Departments of animal husbandry 
will require chiefly good stock; departments 
of pomology will require orchards; and 
other technical departments will need 
chiefly the materials used in actual practice. 

12. Emphasis must not be placed on 
buildings or equipment, but upon teachers. 
Buildings and equipment are only inci- 
dentals, and instead of compensating for any 
lack of human ability they only make more 
apparent the deficiencies of poor instructors. 



69 



CHAPTER IV 

ORGANIZATION OF IN- 
STRUCTION 

LARGE problems exist in every agri- 
cultural college with respect to the 
general plan of instruction. Fortunately, no 
serious misconceptions are current with re- 
gard to these problems as in several other 
fields of agricultural education. Yet no 
single agricultural college has yet met these 
problems with a frank and adequate solu- 
tion. 

Instruction of several different types and 
grades is now being given in every college. 
The principal types may be rather ac- 
curately summarized under the following 
heads: 

1. The graduate school. 

2. The four-year course, leading to the 
degree of Bachelor of Science. 

3. A two-year course, in some colleges. 

70 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

4. The short courses, usually six to twelve 
weeks. 

5. Extra-mural teaching — college exten- 
sion. 

Some colleges also have on their hands 
serious labors with preparatory grades of 
one or two years. These should be elim- 
inated from the college scheme as rapidly as 
possible, and all institutions seem to be fol- 
lowing that policy. 

EFFICIENCY DEMANDS CLEAR DIF- 
FERENTIATION 

Almost without exception these various 
types of teaching have grown up, often quite 
rapidly, in response to definite needs, but 
without any very definite plans, and always 
without any critical study of their place in 
the educational program. The inevitable 
result is that, in a large majority of cases, 
the whole undertaking is still a makeshift, 
often a very poor and wobbly one. Yet we 
have gone far enough to know quite posi- 
tively which forms of instruction are valu- 

71 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

able and ought to be incorporated into our 
permanent plan. 

Doubtless the greatest difficulty arises 
with the teaching force. Everywhere we see 
individual teachers trying to cover the whole 
range, from graduate school to extension 
teaching. Not infrequently we find a man 
giving the same lectures and demonstrations 
to post-graduates, four-year men, short- 
course students and farmers' institutes. 
Everybody knows this is wrong, but only a 
few colleges have had the money and the 
grit to face the situation. 

The breaking point seems to be usually 
with the winter short courses. Teachers al- 
ready loaded to their utmost capacity wake 
up some cold morning in December to find 
their classrooms overrun with fifty or one 
hundred tslw recruits of all ages, sexes and 
Stages of preparation, which in six weeks' 
time have to be drilled into some unity of 
thought and filled with the latest informa- 
tion on some technical specialty. The situ- 
ation is absurd, impossible, sometimes piti- 
able. 

Relief obviously should come through the 

72 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

employment of a separate teaching force for 
the short courses. Only in rare instances 
should the regular instructors from the four- 
year course be permitted to teach in the 
short winter courses. Usually the practical 
line of development lies in using the exten- 
sion staff on the short courses. 

A similar correlation can often be made 
between the graduate school and the re- 
search staff. Men doing research work can 
often handle a few graduate students to the 
advantage of all interests. 

Some plan, however, of providing fairly 
and in a specialized way for the various 
types of instruction is greatly needed in 
every college. It is unfair to teachers, to 
pupils and to the public to allow matters to 
drift as they have done in the past in nearly 
every college in the country. 

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 

While the undergraduate school of agri- 
culture has been modeled largely on the 
classical college the graduate school has 
been utterly under the control of the scien- 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

tists. The classical colleges, so far as now 
appears, never made any respectable at- 
tempt to found graduate schools on their own 
account. The studies in Old French or in 
philology, or in the Shakespearean con- 
cordance, which have brought their Ph. D.'s 
to many American literary students, were 
really founded by the returning troop of pu- 
pils from the German universities, and were 
closely patterned after other investigations 
in chemistry and botany. 

In the field of agriculture the situation 
has been the same. Though a few graduate 
degrees have nominally been given in agri- 
culture, the studies pursued have in fact been 
as distinctly scientific as any others, and the 
whole plan of study, tests and degrees has 
been provided by the science staff. The 
teachers of agriculture and horticulture 
themselves have mostly walked in a dream 
of science. They have aspired to make their 
work scientific, and failing to see the great 
untouched field of technical study, they nat- 
urally have not sought to occupy it. 

Today, one of the most serious needs in the 
entire world of agricultural education is for 

74 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

two or three strong graduate schools which 
shall teach professional specialized agricul- 
ture as distinct from agricultural science. 
Such a school would be a radical innovation, 
and heroic measures would be required to 
put it into working order, but the result 
would be worth the cost. 

The nearest approach to professional 
graduate work in agricultural lines which 
can be cited is found in the forestry schools 
at Yale and Harvard. Here strictly technical 
work is given from the strictly professional 
point of view. It would seem practicable to 
establish similar graduate courses in animal 
husbandry, general agriculture, fruit grow- 
ing and other lines of practical agriculture. 

The first purpose of these courses would 
be to train teachers, investigators and ad- 
ministrators of agricultural enterprises. 
Eventually they might be made so useful as 
to be worth the while of young men who are 
entering productive agriculture on their 
own account. At the present time, however, 
the need for men of better training in col- 
lege and station work is deplorable. It is 
practically impossible to get a man to head 

75 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

a department of market gardening or agron- 
omy who is as well trained as the assistants 
and second assistants in chemistry or zool- 
ogy. 

Inasmuch as the graduate school in agri- 
culture, whenever it may be opened, will at 
first train mostly teachers and investigators, 
it would seem to be highly desirable that the 
curriculum should include some thorough 
work in the principles of education. If 
training in the art of teaching — some gen- 
uine normal school work — could be added, 
so much the better. 

Question has arisen in certain quarters as 
to the graduate degrees to be conferred on 
those who complete advanced courses in ag- 
riculture. Thus far the Master of Science 
and Doctor of Philosophy have almost al- 
ways been given, though, of course, for work 
which was scientific rather than profes- 
sional. The graduate schools of forestry 
and landscape architecture referred to give 
special degrees, Master of Forestry and 
Master of Landscape Architecture. To fol- 
low the analogy the graduate school of agri- 
culture should brand its men Master of 

76 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

Agriculture, or, specializing further, call 
them Masters of Floriculture or Farm En- 
gineering or Poultry Breeding or Cookery. 
Such titles sound ridiculous, and it will 
be desirable to avoid them if possible. The 
multiplication of degrees is in itself a non- 
sensical pedantry to which the agricultural 
colleges should offer a solid resistance. But 
the exact title to be conferred is of such neg- 
ligible importance beside the work to be 
done that it will not do to quarrel long about 
it. By all means let the work begin! 

THE FOUR-YEAR COURSE 

The leading problems of the four-year 
course are, first, the teacher, and second, the 
course of study. As these are discussed in 
separate chapters we may here give atten- 
tion only to certain other secondary but im- 
portant questions. 

It was formerly a grave question of policy 
in many states whether the four-year course 
should be of college or high-school grade. 
It is probably true that most states need agri- 
cultural high schools more than they do ag- 

n 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

ricultural colleges. Many states are now 
organizing these high schools, thus leaving 
the colleges free to do college work. But 
whether the high schools are ready now or 
not it would seem to be sound policy for the 
state agricultural college to assume the col- 
lege standing. Those institutions which 
have held out most vigorously and conscien- 
tiously against the college standards have 
hardly justified their policy by actual re- 
sults. At the present time it can be put 
down as practically settled that the four- 
year agricultural courses should be given 
the same academic standing as other college 
courses in classical or scientific institutions. 
This is not because the agricultural colleges 
are not strong enough to live up to their own 
ideals, but for reasons much deeper and 
sounder than that. 

According to the current educational 
jargon this means that the four-year course 
shall be based on an entrance require- 
ment of fourteen or fifteen "Carnegie 
units." 

Two special problems come up in admin- 
istering entrance reouirements. The quanti- 

'78 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

tatlve measure once established there may 
be some quarrel over the qualitative require- 
ment. Shall the college require modern 
languages or a minimum of mathematics, or 
this or that particular subject? Apparently 
the answer of the best educators is to require 
a reasonable use of the English language 
and four years of honest high-school work, 
saying nothing further about particular sub- 
jects. In this matter the agricultural col- 
leges and state universities should be espe- 
cially liberal when they are asked to join 
hands with the high schools, which are pub- 
lic institutions like themselves. 

The second problem, though merely a 
specialized form of the first, is decidedly 
more difficult. As the agricultural high 
schools get under way they will inevitably 
be sending a few of their graduates to the 
agricultural colleges where they will surely 
find repeated some of their high school sub- 
jects. It is very difficult to deal with such 
cases. Even when the ground covered in a 
college course in agronomy, for instance, is 
practically the same as that covered in a 
high-school course, the quality and method 

79 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

of instruction and the student's ability may 
be very different. The presumption iswholly 
against the high-school course being the 
equivalent of the college course. Yet where- 
ever possible the college policy should still 
be to give whatever credit can be given to 
the high-school work. Credit for entrance, 
however, may be given much more freely 
than credit for advanced standing. 

Every effort should be made to prevent 
the agricultural high schools from becom- 
ing preparatory schools for the agricultural 
colleges. They have quite another and more 
serious function to perform. And the agri- 
cultural colleges should make it clear that 
the best preparation for their four-year 
courses lies in the high schools where math- 
ematics, science and civics constitute the 
bulk of the work. 

THE TWO-YEAR COURSE 

Several agricultural colleges maintain a 

two-year course differing materially, at least 

in theory, from the four-year course. The 

significant differences are: (a) The two- 

80 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

year course is only half as long, (b) Lower 
entrance requirements are allowed. (c) 
The curriculum includes less language, 
mathematics and literary material and rela- 
tively more "practical" instruction, (d) No 
degree is given on graduation, though a cer- 
tificate is usually issued, which outside col- 
lege circles cannot be distinguished from a 
genuine B. S. or A. B. In a number of in- 
stitutions the two-year course is further 
differentiated by beginning and ending at 
different times of the year. 

Theoretically this two-year plan is a good 
one and represents a genuine service which 
the agricultural college ought to offer to its 
clients. Practically the results have been so 
unsatisfactory that many colleges have com- 
pletely rejected the idea. 

Objection has been made that the students 
who complete the two-year courses pass 
themselves off as graduates of the college, 
thus defrauding their employers and injur- 
ing the reputation of the genuine bachelors 
of science. Such misunderstandings unde- 
niably occur, and with relative frequency; 
but this hardly furnished adequate reason 

8i 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

for abolishing a system which is in itself 
serviceable. 

The real troubles with the two-year course 
are two : First, the overloading of teachers ; 
and second, the failure to differentiate the 
course of study. 

As a rule the work of the two-year course 
has simply been loaded upon teachers al- 
ready fully occupied with four-year and 
short-course work — even also with experi- 
mental and extension work. If the two-year 
course is to be maintained it should be fully 
equipped with teachers, and a considerable 
number of these should be employed pri- 
marily and chiefly in this particular enter- 
prise. 

The second difficulty grows partly out of 
the first. Teachers already overwhelmed 
with teaching four-year pupils have no time 
to prepare fresh courses purposely for the 
two-year men. Thus it has very frequently 
happened that the same courses have been 
given to both groups. Indeed, in some in- 
stances the two-year curriculum is princi- 
pally a patchwork of scraps brought to- 
gether from the dissected long course. 
82 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

The two-year course, however, being 
wholly different from the four-year course 
in its fundamental purposes, should be 
equally different in its content and methods. 
Very briefly it may be pointed out that while 
the four-year course holds ever distinctly in 
view two ideals, the cultural and the voca- 
tional, the two-year course throws all em- 
phasis upon the latter and touches matters 
of personal culture only in the most inci- 
dental way. The two-year course has the 
ideals and should have the methods of the 
trade school. The four-year course combines 
the ideals of the university and the pro- 
fessional graduate school, and must employ 
the methods of those schools. To make up 
a two-year program, therefore, along the 
lines of the four-year work is an educational 
solecism and hardly excusable. 

THE SHORT COURSES 

Nearly every aggressive agricultural col- 
lege has experimented extensively with va- 
rious short courses. General experience 
now inclines to a school of six to ten weeks 

83 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

in the winter, at which time a considerable 
list of courses is opened and a pretty free 
election allowed. Practically no entrance 
requirements are enforced for these courses, 
and no special credit given for their com- 
pletion. 

Special provision is frequently made for 
other short courses at other seasons in spe- 
cific subjects, such as beekeeping, poultry 
husbandry, road making, corn judging. 
Where wisely organized and aggressively 
conducted these special short courses are 
quite effective, and represent a real popular 
service. 

The first thing to be done to make short 
courses effective is to place their manage- 
ment in the hands of a special executive of- 
ficer. All experience shows that the general 
faculty will not give the energy, enthusiasm 
and unity of purpose to this enterprise 
which it demands. This director of the 
short courses may be also the director of the 
extension service, or other possible shifts of 
college organization may be made. But an 
independent, aggressive director the short 
courses must have; and where they are of 

84 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

considerable importance it will be much bet- 
ter to assign one good man to this exclusive 
duty. 

Separate teachers are also greatly needed 
for the short courses. The common custom 
of piling the short-course work on to the 
long-course teachers is burdensome to the 
teachers and wholly unfair to the pupils. 
The short-course work ought to be given by 
men of a different type, working from a 
wholly different point of view. Generally 
speaking, the great present need of the short 
courses is that they be wholly restudied as 
an independent, educational enterprise, and 
that they be put on a sound, pedagogic basis. 
This would probably lead to their radical 
reorganization ; but in many colleges they 
seem to be of such large and permanent im- 
portance as fully to justify such revolution- 
ary improvement. 

Short summer courses are now being con- 
ducted by several colleges. The pupils in 
these summer schools are largely school 
teachers, and under any circumstances the 
makeup of the student body is very different 
from that of the winter short courses. The 

8s 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

same general principles, however, govern 
the management of the summer school. It 
is necessary to have a strong executive officer 
in charge (dean or director), specially 
chosen teachers, and a program carefully 
designed to meet the specific purposes for 
which the school exists. 

THE EXTENSION SERVICE 

Strictly speaking, the extension service 
represents a separate branch of the college 
organization, co-ordinate with the experi- 
ment station and the resident teaching es- 
tablishment. It is, however, essentially a 
teaching enterprise, and in any given college 
its scope and character are largely deter- 
mined by the makeup of the local faculty. 
Such work as the correspondence courses 
falls largely on the resident faculty, and is in 
fact separated from the general short 
courses and other forms of teaching only 
arbitrarily. 

Here again the great need is for more 
clear differentiation of the work. Separate 
men wholly devoted to extension service are 
86 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

almost indispensable. It is also highly im- 
portant that the distinctive purposes of the 
extension service shall be clearly understood 
and methods appropriate to those purposes 
adopted. To a large extent this work has 
been an outgrowth of other college activi- 
ties, often a mere relocation of propaganda 
earlier undertaken by the experiment sta- 
tions. In only rare instances has it been 
given fundamental study as a separate edu- 
cational enterprise. 

A fuller discussion of the extension 
service is given in another chapter, but 
the pedagogic aspects of the work deserve 
a few further notes in the present con- 
nection. 

While the college world is only slowly 
discovering that all agricultural teaching 
should be done much more from the techni- 
cal and much less from the scientific point of 
view, the constant necessity for putting prac- 
tice ahead of science is generally quite clear 
in the field of extension work. Whatever 
need there may or may not be for botanists, 
physicists and chemists in the research lab- 
oratories, there is certainly no place for 

87 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

them in extension teaching. The extension 
man must be alive to the technical problems 
of dairying, market gardening, stock feed- 
ing or soil improvement, and the more sci- 
ence he talks the vs^orse for everybody. He 
needs to be a well-trained man, of course; 
and he cannot know too much science of any 
sort, but his science must never get the upper 
hand. 

With the present demand for county ad- 
visers and for extension men in college em- 
ploy there arises a crying need for a thor- 
ough-going training school where men can 
be fitted for such exacting duties. The usual 
graduate school, especially as now organized 
primarily in the interest of scientific re- 
search, is almost useless to this purpose. 
What is needed is something more in the 
nature of a normal school. 

Finally, it must be realized that up to the 
present time the extension service has been 
largely an experiment. All sorts of schemes 
are being tried. The colleges, through 
their extension branches, have attacked 
every conceivable sort of problem — the 
growing of potatoes, the control of insect 
88 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

pests, the elimination of unprofitable roost- 
ers, and the reorganizations of the schools 
and churches. The work has been too scat- 
tering. It has covered too wide a field. Ex- 
perience will certainly lead to concentration. 
A few problems will be chosen and all the 
various forces at command will be directed 
upon them. In these concentrated efforts 
there will be new methods employed not yet 
even tested. For one thing, this concentra- 
tion will lead to much longer and more 
patient work on the adopted problems. In- 
stead of a single evening lecture on the selec- 
tion of seed corn, this subject will be touched 
fifty or one hundred times in a year, and 
from many points of view. Carefully 
planned routine drill on selected points will 
take the place of the transient exhortation 
on all mentionable subjects. 

It seems safe to predict another change 
toward less talk and more doing things. Ex- 
hortation is soon exhausted. It is much bet- 
ter to show men how to candle eggs, how to 
test seed corn, how to pack apples, how to 
mix fertilizers, than to tell them any sort of 
tale from the platform. Practical demon- 

89 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

strations will largely supplant lectures and 
even bulletins. 

SUMMARY 

Teaching is the primary function of all 
the colleges, but the teaching enterprise is a 
complicated one. Surveying the field we 
find: 

1. That every agricultural college has 
under way several quite different forms of 
instruction, the most important being, (a) 
graduate teaching, (b) the bachelor's or 
four-year course, (c) the two-year course, 
(d) the short course, (e) extension teaching, 
in correspondence courses and the like. 

2. These different forms of teaching 
should be much more clearly separated than 
they have been in the past. Each one should 
be independently studied as a separate edu- 
cational enterprise, its specific purposes 
clearly understood, and its curriculum and 
methods worked out to meet those specific 
purposes. 

3. Existing graduate schools are adapted 
to science teaching. Graduate work in tech- 
nical agriculture, now greatly needed, 

90 



ORGANIZATION OF INSTRUCTION 

should be organized on a different basis and 
pursued by quite different methods. Such 
graduate schools, for the immediate future, 
should give considerable normal school 
work. 

4. The four-year course must be of col- 
lege grade. Entrance requirements should 
be high and strict, but full credit should be 
given to all honest work in the high schools. 

5. Two-year courses have not always suc- 
ceeded. If they are to be given they should 
be fully separated from the four-year 
courses and should be given a much larger 
proportion of technical or "practical" in- 
struction. 

6. Short courses, usually of six to ten 
weeks, are of proved value. They should be 
wholly separated from other courses, under 
direction of a special executive officer, and, 
as far as possible, with an independent corps 
of teachers. 

7. In the extension service we find a very 
special form of public instruction, and one 
which requires special teaching methods. 
A separate and peculiar organization is 
obviously required. The forms of teaching 

91 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

will be highly professional, dealing with the 
actual problems of practical agriculture, 
and seldom or never entering upon formal 
science. 



92 



CHAPTER V 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRI- 
CULTURE 

ONE of the most obvious advances of 
the past twenty-five years in the field 
of agriculture has come from subdivision 
and specialization of the work. In the be- 
ginning there was one chair of agriculture. 
Presently this was divided into two chairs, 
agriculture and horticulture, and for an ap- 
preciable time the college world rested 
there. The professor of agriculture was ex- 
pected to know all there was worth knowing 
about farm crops, fertilizers, rotations, prac- 
tical feeding, stock breeding, marketing, 
farm management, rural law and politics, 
farm buildings, and whole encyclopedias 
more. As we look back now it seems incom- 
prehensible that some of the men assigned to 
this impossible field accomplished so much. 
There were great men in those days, whose 
reputations remain undimmed by the fact 

93 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

that they were never specialists in the mod- 
ern sense. 

But recently agriculture, horticulture and 
domestic science have been rapidly differ- 
entiated. One man specializes in stock feed- 
ing, another in breeding, while others con- 
fine themselves not merely to breeds, but to 
breeds of one particular group, as swine or 
sheep. For purposes of investigation such 
specialization cannot go too far; but in the 
work of teaching it quickly passes from an 
advantage to a distinct defect. We will re- 
turn to this point presently. 

AGRICULTURE 

The first break in agriculture always 
comes between plant life and animal life. 
This is usually followed by a separation of 
soil and fertilizer studies from plant life, 
leaving a three-fold subdivision of what was 
formerly all agriculture. Thus we have — 

Animal husbandry. 

Field crops. 

Soils and fertilizers. 

This does not last long, however. Ani- 
mal husbandry soon becomes unwieldy, and 

94 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

one man confines himself to feeds and feed- 
ing, while another studies breeds and breed- 
ing. The dairy industry, largely concerned 
with manufacturing and with marketing 
milk and milk products, soon finds room for 
separate development. 

Next, there has to be careful attention 
given to subjects overlooked in the primary 
subdivision, such as agricultural engineer- 
ing and farm administration. Perhaps farm 
marketing will be differentiated from farm 
administration and become an independent 
department. This brings us to the second 
stage (historically the third) of progress by 
subdivision, giving us the following subjects, 
possibly represented by separate depart- 
ments, or at least by individual specialists : 

Breeds and breeding. 

Feeds and feeding. 

Dairying. 

Farm crops. 

Soils and fertilizers. 

Farm engineering. 

Farm administration. 

Agricultural marketing. 

Beyond this it has not yet seemed wise to 

95 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

go in the formation of new departments ; but 
the employment of specialists has frequently 
led to much more minute subdivision. Thus 
we find experts dealing only with horses, 
poultry or dairy cattle; other specialists 
working with particular crops, as corn, cot- 
ton or tobacco; other men devoting them- 
selves to such topics as cheese making, drain- 
age, dry farming, farm buildings, etc., etc. 

This latter type of specialization, repre- 
sented rather by men than by burdensome 
departmental organizations, is particularly 
flexible and apt to be convenient and effi- 
cient — though we must not neglect to notice 
that this high degree of specialization is 
useful chiefly in research instead of in teach- 
ing. 

HORTICULTURE 

By every statistical test, horticulture is 
much less important than agriculture, of 
which, in the broad sense, it is only a branch. 
Yet for very good and sufficient reasons it 
has played a role in agricultural college de- 
velopment quite out of proportion to its 

96 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

Statistical weight. In general it has marched 
side by side with its co-ordinate agriculture. 
This is, of course, because it has been able 
to render an equal service in agricultural 
progress, and especially in agricultural col- 
lege development. 

In some of the agricultural colleges, as in 
the United States Department of Agricul- 
ture, the line has been drawn, not between 
agriculture and horticulture, but between 
animal industry and plant industry, leaving 
the whole of horticulture grouped with 
agronomy or field crops. In a way this seems 
more logical, but practically the differ- 
ence amounts to very little. Either form of 
subdivision leaves two large groups to be 
still further subdivided; and it would be 
useless to argue whether forestry is more 
closely affiliated with market gardening 
than the manufacture of butter with the 
breeding of mules. Any institution which 
finds one line of analysis more conformable 
to its needs and circumstances than the other 
should feel free to follow its own desires. 

Now horticulture in American colleges 
has usually meant pomology; and in the 

97 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

northern states has in fact meant apple cul- 
ture. But as the horticultural industries are 
the first to specialize in practice, so the sub- 
division of material in the colleges could not 
long be delayed. 

Market gardening and floriculture were 
the first industries to assert their existence 
separately from pomology, and are now usu- 
ally recognized as so widely differentiated as 
to require specialists and usually separate 
department organizations. 

Forestry has been recognized almost from 
the first as a separate subject, and is in fact 
included with horticulture only arbitrarily. 
It is entirely capable of standing by itself, 
and deserves separate organization wherever 
trees grow and agricultural colleges flourish. 

Landscape gardening has from the first 
been brought within the scope of horticul- 
ture. For this there is no logical foundation 
in fact. The subject is as distantly related 
to horticulture as forestry. Nevertheless, it 
is convenient to group it with horticulture, 
and the association has never proved disad- 
vantageous to anyone. Perhaps it is proper 
to say here that, though the name is widely 

98 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

used in departments of horticulture, land- 
scape gardening is in fact taught in very few 
agricultural colleges. The courses com- 
monly given deal with the plant materials 
used in landscape gardening, and have the 
same relation to the subject, therefore, as a 
study of paints and oils has to the art of 
painting. 

Landscape gardening, however, is pri- 
marily an art of design; and it would seem 
to the writer, whose own specialty is here 
under discussion, that the best practice in 
agricultural colleges would be to introduce 
elementary courses in real landscape art, 
i. e., in the principles of design as applied to 
land improvement, perhaps replacing the 
present courses in ornamental plants. Such 
courses should confine themselves to a few 
type problems, such as the design of the 
farmyard, the design of the school grounds, 
the design of a playground ; and should deal 
primarily with questions of structure and 
space arrangement. If to these ideas there 
could be added some plain instruction in 
civic art, such as the orderly improvement 
of public commons, cemeteries, roads and 

99 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

roadsides, the agricultural colleges would 
be giving much more effective attention to 
the subject of landscape gardening. 

Extended professional courses in land- 
scape gardening need be given in only a few 
institutions in the country. The attempt to 
give such instruction in many places would 
be a sad waste of effort. Some academic 
discussion has developed as to whether 
the classical universities, the engineering 
schools, the architectural schools, or the 
agricultural colleges offer the best en- 
vironment in which to develop such 
professional courses in landscape gardening. 
Theoretically, the schools of architecture 
would be the best sponsors ; but such schools 
do not exist in America with sufficient 
strength to do the work. The engineering 
schools are theoretically and practically out 
of the question. And inasmuch as landscape 
gardening is a highly technical profession, 
it would seem to flourish better in the tech- 
nical and professional environment of the 
agricultural colleges than in the reflective 
and non-technical schools of arts in the 
classical colleges. It is perfectly natural, 
100 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

therefore, that the strongest work in land- 
scape gardening should now be growing up 
in the colleges of agriculture. 

There is, of course, the same opportunity 
and the same need for specialization in hor- 
ticulture as in agriculture. Thus in pomol- 
ogy there may be one man who is an expert 
on small fruits, one whose field is systematic 
pomology, one who studies only the technic 
of spraying, etc. It may seem wise in cer- 
tain cases to employ specialists also for par- 
ticular crops, as cranberries, potatoes or 
roses. 

The manufacture of fruit and vegetable 
products further calls for the service of 
well-trained specialists. 

GENETICS 

The subject of genetics, thremmatology, 
or the science of breeding, stands for the 
present in an anomalous position. The 
principles of genetics apparently apply with 
equal force in animal breeding and In plant 
breeding. Genetics, therefore, really classi- 
fies with the sciences. Yet the departments 

lOI 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

of animal industry have been so deeply in- 
volved in the genetics of stock breeding that 
they have not been willing, nor indeed able, 
to turn the subject over to any department 
of pure science. Similarly the departments 
of crop production have been so keenly alive 
to the work of plant breeding that they have 
kept the study of genetics warm for them- 
selves. 

Under present circumstances it seems al- 
most necessary to maintain a department of 
stock breeding in the division of agriculture, 
a department of plant breeding in the divi- 
sion of horticulture, and a department of 
genetics in the division of science. Where 
all these cannot be kept up it would seem 
best to begin with the department of plant 
breeding, allowing stock breeding to be 
handled along with types and breeds until 
such time as it can be wisely separated into 
an independent department, and leaving the 
erection of a science department of genetics 
to the last. The reason for putting plant 
breeding first is that it is the simplest field 
for the study of thremmatology, and the one 
in which the most concrete material is 

102 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

available, either for teaching or re- 
search. 

Genetics is a very satisfactory classroom 
subject, especially suited to the sophomore 
year of the college course. The popular 
theory is that it should precede specific 
studies in plant breeding or stock breeding. 
This theory, however, is fully examined 
elsewhere and the reverse conclusion 
reached, viz., that the concrete lines of study 
should precede the more abstract and gener- 
alized lines. The logical sequence, there- 
fore, would seem to be to begin the sopho- 
more year with a term of plant breeding, 
stressing the observational work and mini- 
mizing the theory; to follow this with a 
term of stock breeding, also giving prime at- 
tention to quantitative and observational 
studies; following this with a term of ge- 
netic theory, designed to synthesize and ex- 
plain the observations of the preceding two 
courses. 

DOMESTIC SCIENCE 

In most of the agricultural colleges do- 
mestic science stands precisely on the same 
103 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

footing as agriculture and horticulture, and 
faces exactly the same problems. It has 
been agreed by the teachers of domestic 
science that the field should be divided into 
four parts, viz. : 

Food. 

Clothing. 

Shelter. 

Household and Institution Management. 

These subjects easily subdivide further; 
and such subdivision, accompanied by 
specialization, is, of course, necessary to 
efficient work on a large scale. Thus the 
subject of food has three outstanding sub- 
divisions: (a) kinds and sources; (b) prep- 
aration, i. e., cookery; and (c) physiology 
of nutrition. Clothing subdivides into (a) 
textiles, (b) sewing, and (c) costume de- 
sign. And so with the rest. 

All these fields offer still further oppor- 
tunity for the specialization of individuals, 
just as in agriculture and horticulture. One 
teacher or investigator may attend only to 
cereals; another to invalid cookery; another 
to the computation of rations, etc., etc. 
104 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 
LIMITATIONS OF SPECIALIZATION 

Reference has already been made to the 
principle that specialization may go much 
further in the research organization than in 
the field of teaching. In the former there is 
hardly any limit to the extent of specializa- 
tion. The more a man narrows his field the 
deeper he can go, and depth (with thor- 
oughness) is the quality most to be desired 
in investigation. But in teaching, breadth 
is more to be regarded than mere profun- 
dity. Here specialization may easily go too 
far. 

How far should it go, for example, in the 
four-year course? To this question a fairly 
definite answer can be given. The four-year 
course should prepare men to enter upon 
definite lines of productive agriculture or 
upon definite agricultural professions. Ex- 
amples of the former would be poultry rais- 
ing, fruit growing, general farming. Ex- 
amples of the latter would be research in soil 
physics, landscape gardening, estate man- 
agement. Thus when we ask how far a 
105 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

man should specialize in college, if he pro- 
poses to take up practical poultry growing, 
we are able to answer with some confidence. 
He may, indeed, intend to specialize within 
this field, as in growing ducks or producing 
heavy roasters; but he will at least want to 
know all the best that can be shown him 
about modern poultry culture. This field 
he will want to examine broadly, learning 
about breeds and breeding, feeding, exhibit- 
ing, egg production, meat production, incu- 
bation and brooding, diseases, storage of 
products and marketing. 

On the assumption that the four-year 
course consists of forty term courses of three 
credits each — the common standard — the 
student will want from seven to ten courses 
in the poultry subjects here outlined. The 
field can be fairly covered, but not ex- 
hausted, in this time. But the teacher should 
avoid exhaustive treatment of any subject 
in the undergraduate school, aiming rather 
at thorough drill upon selected type phases. 

The pupil going into poultry husbandry 
should have these poultry courses fortified 
by several more general courses in animal 
1 06 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

husbandry and a few in general farm man- 
agement. These together should number 
six to eight additional courses. 

Every student will have certain other 
semi-professional ideas of his own which 
will want room for development. One man 
will want to combine fruit growing with his 
poultry work, and will elect two or three 
courses in pomology. For another it will be 
market gardening. Another will have a 
leaning toward veterinary practice which 
will lead him to elect in that field. And so 
on. We may easily estimate these elections 
at two to five courses. 

Summarizing these requirements by 
courses, we find the four years occupied 
somewhat as follows : 

Minimum 

Specialized professional 6 

Semi-professional 4 

Collateral technical 2 

Cultural, including science, 

civics and humanities 28 



Optimum 


Maximum 


ID 


15 


6 


10 


4 


8 


20 


7 



40 40 40 



From this summary it is easy to conclud 
that any teaching department has reachei 
107 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

the limit of practicable specialization when 
it offers ten separate courses. Even this 
program should be attempted only by strong, 
well-equipped, well-manned departments 
operating in fields of considerable impor- 
tance. It should always be remembered, 
moreover, that it is infinitely better to give 
two sound, thorough courses, well taught, 
than ten sloppy, half-baked courses with 
nothing in them. . 

OVERLAPPING 

One internal college problem remains to 
be considered in this connection — a prob- 
lem which causes as much human trouble as 
anything within the whole range of college 
administration. This is the problem of 
overlapping. 

As soon as we begin to add departments 
and to multiply specialists we inevitably 
find different departments and different men 
claiming the same field. For example, take 
the questions which are connected with the 
use of commercial fertilizers. The depart- 
ment of chemistry first puts in its claim, then 
1 08 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

the department of soils, then perhaps farm 
management; while departments of pomol- 
ogy and market gardening and farm crops 
naturally feel license to prescribe all the fer- 
tilizers needed in growing their respective 
crops. Competition arises between these de- 
partments for men and equipment; also 
there is sometimes radical divergence of 
opinion on the technical questions involved. 

These conflicts are not rare. They are fre- 
quent — universal to the college world. 
What is to be done about them? 

As long as college staffs must be made up 
of human beings it is perhaps expecting too 
much to hope that these difficulties will ever 
be wholly removed. By wise management, 
however, they can be greatly ameliorated. 
First, and most of all, though not simplest 
of all, they can be mitigated by improving 
the esprit de corps. Keeping up a good 
spirit in a college staff is a great art, but one 
which no one yet knows how to teach. If all 
workers can be friendly to one another, 
loyal to their college, and enthusiastic for 
institutional success; and if they can be 
guided by wise, patient, tactful, executive 
109 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

oversight, the best will be accomplished, and 
conflicts due to departmental overlapping 
will be reduced to the minimum. 

The method outlined in another chapter 
of assigning particular problems or projects 
to individuals instead of trying to delimit 
large departments, has been offered mainly 
as a remedy of the overlapping evil. It has 
not proved an unbounded success. Jeal- 
ousies and friction still inhabit the organiza- 
tions where this system has been most fully 
introduced. On the whole, it seems better 
adapted to a large organization engaged in 
research than to a small staff whose work is 
principally teaching or extension. 

In some institutions such questions are set- 
tled by arbitrary authority. The president, 
a director, or the trustees, undertake to 
designate the men who shall handle all mat- 
ters pertaining to fertilizers, or nutrition, or 
spraying, or drainage, or any other disputed 
field. If such central authority is strong, 
just and tactful in its decisions, this method 
is probably the very best that can be devised. 

One or two principles may be laid down, 
however, which may help in adjusting these 
no 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

perennial conflicts. The first of these is that 
a certain amount of overlapping is inevi- 
table and need not be injurious. For ex- 
ample, the entomologist must say something 
about spraying in his course on economic 
entomology; the botanist must also discuss it 
to some extent in his course on plant dis- 
eases; the market gardener and the florist 
must refer to spraying in connection with 
their crops ; while the department of pomol- 
ogy must give elaborate courses in spray ma- 
chinery, materials and technic. Moreover, 
it is impossible for every entomologist, bot- 
anist, market gardener and florist who goes 
through college to take the big spraying 
courses in the department of pomology. As 
long as these several departments refer to 
spraying only incidentally the propriety of 
their courses is clear enough; but it would 
be bad management to permit the depart- 
ments of entomology, botany and pomology 
all to give full-term courses in spraying. 
For as soon as the student of entomology or 
botany elects an entire term in the subject he 
can take the work in the department of 
pomology as well as anywhere. 
Ill 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

The second principle is that disputed 
questions should preferably be assigned to 
the departments of science, rather than to 
the technical departments, when research 
work is in hand, but should go by preference 
to the technical departments for teaching. 
In case of extension teaching they should 
go always and wholly to the technical de- 
partments, the science departments being 
eliminated entirely from the extension 
service. 

When conflicts arise between two techni- 
cal departments an arbitrary settlement is 
almost necessary. For example, shall the 
potato crop be studied by the agronomy or 
the market gardening department? In gen- 
eral, it will be good policy for any institu- 
tion to decide such questions in favor of the 
stronger department, or else to strengthen 
the other department by adding a new man 
and assigning the disputed subject to him. 

REVIEW 

The discussions of the present chapter 
may be summarized as follows : 

112 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

1. Specialization has been a great factor 
in the development of the agricultural col- 
leges. The subject matter of agriculture 
and domestic science may be almost end- 
lessly divided and subdivided. 

2. Agriculture has been conveniently di- 
vided into (a) breeds and breeding of live 
stock, (b) feeds and feeding, (c) dairying, 
(d) farm crops, (e) soils and fertilizers, 
(f) farm engineering, (g) farm adminis- 
tration, (h) agricultural marketing. Occa- 
sionally other departments are recognized. 

3. Horticulture has been partitioned into 
pomology, market gardening, floriculture, 
forestry, landscape gardening, with the 
manufacture of by-products and plant 
breeding often added. 

4. Beyond these subdivisions, usually rep- 
resented by departments, specialization is 
carried ad libitum by the employment of 
men for very narrow and specific problems. 

5. Genetics belongs to the pure sciences; 
but animal breeding and plant breeding 
must be maintained in the technical groups. 
In teaching, the concrete study of plant and 

113 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

animal variation and inheritance ought to 
precede the science of genetics. 

6. Domestic science is authoritatively di- 
vided into (a) food, (b) clothing, (c) 
shelter, and (d) household and institutional 
management. These subjects are further 
subdivided according to need, after the 
method followed in agriculture and horti- 
culture. 

7. However, there are limits to special- 
ization, especially in the field of teaching. 
As a rule no department should ever give 
more than ten undergraduate courses. 

8. Overlapping is a constant worry and 
is apt to cause great trouble. The remedies 
are (a) better esprit de corps, (b) better 
organization, (c) arbitrary but just deci- 
sions by authority, (d) the recognition of 
certain controlling principles. 

9. Finally, it should be the ideal of every 
college to have only as many departments as 
it can effectively support, and of each de- 
partment to give only such courses as it can 
carry through with thoroughness and en- 
thusiasm. It is much better to have a few 
departments well manned, well equipped, 

114 



SPECIALIZATION IN AGRICULTURE 

well administered, than to have many de- 
partments undermanned, half equipped and 
heedlessly administered. The same prin- 
ciple applies with equal force to individual 
departments. 



•115 



CHAPTER VI 

THE COURSE OF STUDY- 
MATERIALS 

THE importance of the course of study 
will bear heavy emphasis; in fact, al- 
most any emphasis which does not overlook 
the only two things which are of greater im- 
portance in the teaching business, viz., the 
teacher and the methods of teaching. The 
character and work of the teacher transcend 
in influence every other factor; and the 
methods employed in teaching are often, 
perhaps usually, of more importance than 
the matter taught. In reality, no teacher 
can teach anything but himself. Instead of 
filling a student with Latin or cookery or 
poultry husbandry, all he can truly commu- 
nicate is his own personality. 

But these large considerations aside, it 
does make a great difference what sub- 
jects are included in a college or high-school 
ii6 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

curriculum, and how they are arranged. On 
account of the fact that the agricultural fac- 
ulties have been made up almost exclusively 
of specialists who had no interest in educa- 
tional problems as such, the agricultural 
courses of study have been sadly neglected. 
There has been constant tinkering, to be 
sure, but rarely any intelligent and never 
any expert study of the curriculum. In the 
better developed colleges, however, the time 
is ready for a change. We are mostly will- 
ing to have a logical and effective course of 
study if only someone will show it to us. 
(Of course individually each will still insist 
that his own subject is indispensable and 
must be required, at least two or three 
years.) 

MATERIALS 

A brief review of the materials from 
which the curriculum is to be constructed 
shows that they may be readily grouped into 
three or four fairly distinct classes. These 
are (a) the humanities, so-called, including 
languages, literature, history, economics 
117 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

and sociology, (b) the sciences, (c) the tech- 
nical subjects, as all branches of agriculture, 
horticulture and household arts, (d) Math- 
ematics are really so much different from 
the natural sciences that they ought to be 
considered by themselves. In order to find 
the place of any of these subjects in the 
course of study it is absolutely essential to 
decide what service each is to render, and 
this service must be looked at primarily 
from the standpoint of the student. For 
while the college exists distinctly for the 
service of the state, its teaching work can be 
made effective only in so far as it reaches 
and develops individual men. 

As regards the agricultural material, it 
has already been pointed out that it serves 
two purposes, which are precisely the two, 
purposes for which the college exists, viz, 
to train men and women for service in prac- 
tical vocations and also to give them that 
personal development of character often 
called culture. The first purpose is very 
commonly emphasized to the detriment of 
the second, and yet the first purpose is often 
partially defeated for the sake of the sec- 
ii8 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

ond. It is a curious perversion of ideas 
which so commonly exists at the very 
foundation of agricultural education. 

For more than a century, and especially 
during the last forty years, the common 
world has been infatuated with the idea of 
vocational training in agriculture. Teach- 
ing agriculture in the public schools and in 
colleges has been a pet idea of farmers, edi- 
tors and statesmen for two generations. In 
recent times leading educators, especially 
those in the swing of normal school work, 
have been pressing also for the same ideal. 
It must be confessed that agricultural col- 
lege faculties generally have shown much 
less faith in this ideal than the outside world. 
The simple and adequate explanation of this 
surprising fact — for it is a fact — is that a 
large majority of such faculties have always 
been classically trained men and science- 
trained men. Even the teachers of agricul- 
ture, horticulture and household economics 
have been scientifically rather than voca- 
tionally trained. If the professor of dairy- 
ing has had his training with a microscope 
and test tubes, instead of with cows and 
119 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

churns and curd presses, he is practically 
certain to make of his college department a 
science laboratory, rather than a working 
dairy. 

The vocational ideal in the teaching of ag- 
ricultural and household subjects needs to 
be very greatly strengthened in American 
agricultural colleges. In the new high 
schools this ideal is now much more vivid 
and influential. 

At the same time the cultural and human- 
itarian ideal in vocational training needs to 
be exalted. Teachers of agriculture and 
household arts must have much greater faith 
in their work, both for vocational efficiency 
and for personal culture. 

The fact that agriculture and household 
arts are worth very much more for all the 
purposes of education than has yet been 
understood means that they should have a 
large place in the curriculum. The fact is, 
these subjects have grown rapidly in relative 
importance. When I was a student, about 
1890, in the leading agricultural college of 
that day, the course of study incHided t\vo 
terms of agriculture and one term of horti- 
120 



THE COURSE OF STUDY — MATERIALS 

culture. Today in the same institution the 
agricultural student may secure fifteen to 
twenty terms of vocational work, and the 
actual vocational quality of the work has 
improved almost as much as the quantity. 
Twelve years ago there were five courses in 
horticulture in the Massachusetts Agricul- 
tural College; today there are thirty. In 
quality the courses have been rapidly pro- 
fessionalized. 

As matters have gone during the past 
twenty-five years the quantity of agriculture 
in the curriculum has been increased just as 
fast as the material could be put into teach- 
able form. As fast as any man has been able 
to develop a course place has been found for 
it. Indeed, many courses have been ad- 
mitted which might be charitably called 
half-baked. In the near future much higher 
standards are going to be required. 

Nevertheless, the quality of the teaching 
in agriculture and home economics has 
greatly improved, and this improvement has 
been directly in the line of more professional 
work. It hardly needs to be said that qual- 
ity is more important than quantity in any 

121 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

estimate of the value of any kind of teaching. 

Yet this is not enough. One move more 
of a most radical nature remains to be made. 
Not only is it desirable to have more pro- 
fessional material in the curricula, not only 
is it important to have the professional 
teaching greatly improved in quality, but 
the professional courses must be given a 
commanding position in the course of study. 
Other courses must be made secondary and 
contributory to these. 

In the curriculum provided for the train- 
ing of men in agronomy, for example, the 
agronomy courses must have the right of 
way. They must be placed at the most ad- 
vantageous points in the program. Then 
the men who are directing the agronomy 
work must be the judges who shall decide 
what supporting subjects are necessary. 
They must say whether chemistry or ento- 
mology, or electricity or psychology or the- 
ology is required by their students. Still 
further, they must decide, not only the names 
of the supporting subjects, but the actual 
matter taught. If botany is taught for the 
benefit of the agronomists, the professor of 

122 



THE COURSE OF STUDY — MATERIALS 

agronomy knows much better than the pro- 
fessor of botany what parts of the subject his 
pupils need. 

Now this means, indeed, a radical change 
in most colleges. Instead of finding agricul- 
ture in command of the curriculum it has 
been the usual experience to find it tolerated 
at the foot of the class — not seldom kicked 
about the college by the superior forces of 
science and the humanities. This situation, 
of course, has usually been the fault of agri- 
culture. The teachers of agriculture and 
horticulture have not known themselves 
what they wanted. They have not had a 
sound teaching command of their own sub- 
jects, to say nothing of the sciences and other 
neighboring departments. No one need 
blame the scientists and the classical men in 
the faculties because they knew a great deal 
better than the agriculturists what they 
wanted, or because they had a mature and 
logical program, while the agriculturists 
had none. I hold it quite to their credit. 
Only it does seem that by this time the teach- 
ers of agriculture, horticulture and home 
economics ought to have gained command 
123 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

of their own field — ought to know what they 
want, ought to have a working program of 
college teaching, and ought to be ready to 
direct the entire curriculum of those stu- 
dents committed to their special care. 

This program will meet opposition from 
the teachers of the humanities, who feel that 
the personal culture of all students has been 
especially committed to their custody, and 
from the scientific staff, a majority of whom 
still insist upon the untenable premise that 
the sciences supply the foundation upon 
which agriculture must be taught, and add 
to this erroneous premise their very natural 
opinion that they know how to teach science 
better than the agriculturists do. They 
ought to admit, indeed, that the agricul- 
turists know how to teach agriculture better 
than the scientists do (a proposition which 
will be true some time, even where it is not 
already). And here, let us repeat, we are 
concerned only in handling courses for stu- 
dents who are specializing in agriculture 
and home economics. Let the scientists con- 
trol the work of men who are to be scientists ; 
but the teachers of the technical subjects 
124 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

must control the work, and practically all 
the work, of those men who are to be farm- 
ers, stock growers, dairymen, fruit growers, 
florists, foresters. 

Times are improving rapidly, but even at 
the present day it is difficult, usually impos- 
sible, for the technical departments to secure 
any sympathetic support from the science 
departments — a condition due, not so much 
to human frailty, after all, as to radical dif- 
ferences in point of view. For example, 
botany has always been a required subject 
in the early years of every course, on the 
theory that it supplied a foundation for hor- 
ticulture and agriculture. The sad fact is 
that it never gave any such foundation; that 
it has very rarely been of any direct bene- 
fit ; that it has usually quite ignored the work 
of the technical departments which it was 
expected to support. Teachers of pomology 
or forestry or floriculture who have tried to 
influence the courses in botany toward the 
introduction of material needed in these 
technical fields have usually been summarily 
squelched. The botanist has controlled the 
courses in botany and he has always found it 
'1 25 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

inconvenient, at the least, to rearrange his 
courses to suit the whims of other depart- 
ments, especially when those departments 
knew nothing about science anyway, and 
couldn't understand his scientific point of 
view. The botanist has said to himself, and 
sometimes to his friend the suppliant 
pomologist, that he knew better what ought 
to be taught to students in botany, and he has 
gone on his own sweet way unchanged. The 
same situation has prevailed quite generally 
between science and technical departments 
everywhere. 

This condition, which we are now about 
ready to leave behind, rests upon just two 
things — one a fallacious theory and the 
other an unfortunate fact. The fallacious 
theory is that the sciences are the necessary 
foundation of agriculture (a superstition 
fully discussed elsewhere). The unfor- 
tunate fact is that the technical teachers are 
so very slow to understand the educational 
principles involved in their own teaching 
and to formulate a sound, educational basis 
for their curricula. As these two difficulties 
are progressively eliminated we shall see our 
126 



THE COURSE OF STUDY — MATERIALS 

agricultural teaching put upon a very differ- 
ent footing. 

While the whole teaching of agriculture 
and kindred subjects has altered amazingly 
in the past twenty years, the greatest and 
deepest change has taken place in the point 
of view from which the subject is taught. 
The first ideal was obviously the teaching of 
"practical" farming. This word practical 
was in constant use and abuse. The ideal 
was essentially one of manual training, and 
might be maintained in what is now known 
as a trade school in distinction from a 
college. 

This manual training ideal was soon re- 
placed by the classroom notion of giving 
quantities of text-book information about 
agriculture. Those who, like myself, can re- 
member some of those curious old courses, 
made up of extracts from Xenophon, Col- 
umella and the superstitions of planting by 
the moon, and of "prenatal influences" in 
stock breeding, will understand that not 
much was gained by the change. 

As the scientists continued their wonder- 
ful success in the realm of agriculture the 
127 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

third ideal rapidly emerged. This was the 
science ideal purely and simply. The lead- 
ing agricultural teachers endeavored, with 
considerable success, to cast their materials 
into scientific form and to teach them in the 
purely scientific method. One famous and 
representative teacher of this school used to 
say that practice could never be taught be- 
cause practice is local, temporary and inci- 
dental; while principles only should be 
taught, because they are general, permanent 
and universal. This third ideal still very 
largely prevails, because it is relatively easy 
to realize, because it works well, but chiefly 
because the majority of agricultural teachers 
are scientifically instead of technically 
trained. 

Anyone who is close to the teaching prob- 
lem, however, must have noticed that the 
strikingly successful courses in recent days 
in the field of agriculture, horticulture and 
domestic economy have not been the most 
scientific courses, but precisely the opposite ; 
that is, the courses which have been the most 
thoroughly technical. The men who have 
introduced strong courses, with a maximum 
128 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

of practice and a minimum of lectures in 
apple packing, in farm motors, in green- 
house management, in poultry management, 
have got the students. And they have the 
students, not because of any passing v^him, 
but because the courses are effective and the 
students are quite bright enough to know it. 
The new ideal — and the coming one — in 
agricultural teaching may be called the 
technical or professional ideal. It is much 
more practical than the old-time notion of 
"practical" teaching, because it has a deeper 
foundation and a broader outlook. It views 
each branch of agricultural practice as a 
body of technic, wholly rational even when 
not scientific, wholly vital and worth while 
in itself, without the necessity of scientific 
affiliations to dignify it. It looks upon this 
body of technic as a closely knit, logical 
body of knowledge significant chiefly in the 
outcome. Such classified knowledge might 
indeed be called science; but science esti- 
mates knowledge in the abstract, one truth 
being just as valuable as another. Technical 
knowledge is judged wholly by results. A 
method of setting celery plants may be ca- 
129 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

pable of a beautiful diagrammatic scientific 
explanation, but if another method will get 
the best crop of celery any lack of abstract 
merit will not help it. This technical point 
of view is almost antipodally removed from 
the true scientific point of view; and yet it 
is precisely this different ideal which now 
leads the way in the best agricultural teach- 
ing of the day. 

THE SCIENCES 

As matters stand at present the one over- 
shadowing problem in agricultural educa- 
tion, at least in the colleges, is the radical 
readjustment of the relations between 
science subjects and science teaching on the 
one hand and technical subjects and techni- 
cal teaching on the other. The present sit- 
uation, which has been reached by a 
perfectly natural evolution, may be charac- 
terized as foUow^s: The curricula of the 
agricultural colleges are controlled by the 
sciences; while, on the rear, the classics con- 
tinue a losing fight for the ground which the 
sciences have taken from them, on the front, 
130 



THE COURSE OF STUDY — MATERIALS 

the agricultural subjects press a winning 
fight for the command of the field. 

Practically speaking, agricultural educa- 
tion began in this country with science. Ag- 
ricultural chemistry and agricultural botany 
were about the only distinctive work which 
the colleges could muster. Economic ento- 
mology and agricultural physics were soon 
added, while a few heroic teachers tried to 
make something of agricultural geology. 

Now, however, agriculture has a long list 
of subjects of her own — agronomy, farm ad- 
ministration, stock breeding, stock feeding, 
agricultural machinery, dairy husbandry, 
dairy manufactures, etc., etc., etc., almost 
without end. The original theory of the re- 
lation between the sciences and technical 
agriculture was that the former gave the 
necessary foundation for the latter. A good 
deal can be said in favor of this theory; but 
there are two fatal objections to it. The first 
is that it never did work; and the second is 
that a much better theory is now in sight. 

Attention has already been called to the 
practically universal fact that, while the 
scientist has sincerely believed he was laying 

131 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

the foundation for agriculture, the agricul- 
turists and horticulturists have never been 
able to build on the foundations thus laid. 
While this may have been their fault in 
specific cases, it is radically the fault of the 
system. 

The professors of education all insist that, 
instead of science being the foundation for 
agriculture, agriculture is the foundation 
for science. And this relationship seems to 
be especially significant in the realm of 
teaching. The pupil should have his prac- 
tical w^ork first — his observation, his active 
motor exercises, his physical contacts, his 
tests of judgment. These will raise ques- 
tions In his mind which can be answered by 
science, especially (and this is very impor- 
tant) if science is taught for this purpose and 
from the point of view established in agri- 
culture. Of course if the student is com- 
pelled, after the current manner, to relin- 
quish his agricultural point of view before 
he can do anything in science, this plan fails. 
But it fails only because science will not co- 
operate with agriculture in the field which 
belongs to the latter. 

132 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

Thus we have clearly indicated the direc- 
tion in which science teaching must be re- 
formed for application in the professional 
curriculum. Science, taught for science's 
sake, will continue to follow its old chan- 
nels; but a wholly different kind of science, 
taught in a different way, from a very dif- 
ferent point of view, applied at a different 
point is required for the present needs of 
agriculture, horticulture and home eco- 
nomics. This reform in the teaching of 
science will follow just as soon as the techni- 
cal departments shall have found them- 
selves. The technical teaching must be 
brought into line first • then the science must 
promptly follow. 

Already the question has been raised 
whether pomological botany, for example, 
shall be taught in the department of pomol- 
ogy or of botany. I recently heard a promi- 
nent (but passe') educator declare that 
within ten 3^ears no agriculture will be 
taught outside the departments of physics, 
chemistry and botany. It seems much more 
probable that ten years hence no physics, 
chemistry or botany will be taught outside 

133 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

the fields where students are enrolled 
for agronomy, pomology or market gar- 
dening. 

The change to a different kind of science 
teaching is so imperatively needed that it 
will presently be roughly pressed against all 
resistance. While doubtless the ideal way 
of teaching college botany, for example, is 
to teach it in a department of botany with a 
botanist for teacher, the practical necessities 
of the technical courses will require the hor- 
ticulturists to teach their own botany to 
their own students. The majority of them 
have indeed been doing this for years. Usu- 
ally it has been done clandestinely and 
weakly — the half-concealed target of con- 
stant jibes from the botanists. Very soon it 
will be done boldly and effectively and to 
the rich satisfaction of students in horticul- 
ture. Most horticultural teachers have had 
considerable botanical training and can 
teach effectively all the botany required in 
an undergraduate course in horticulture. 
'And it is quite indisputable that they can 
make this botany more effective for the pur- 
poses of horticulture than any scientist who 

134 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

teaches botany from the science viewpoint. 
Probably the best practical arrangement 
will be to have upon the horticultural staff 
a good teacher, trained primarily in techni- 
cal horticulture, but who has also special- 
ized in botany without losing his technical 
outlook, and to commit the horticultural 
botany to his charge. In the same way agri- 
cultural chemistry and agricultural physics 
may have to be taught in the departments of 
agriculture in order to secure for them the 
proper point of view. Such an arrangement 
will be all the more desirable wherever col- 
leges adopt the plan of segregating technical 
students during parts of their courses for 
more intensive professional training. 

MATHEMATICS 

A very different position in the curricu- 
lum is occupied by the mathematics. These 
subjects have seldom pretended to be "prac- 
tical." They have always been free from 
the hypocrisy of serving as a "foundation 
for agriculture." Their service is frankly 
disciplinary. They have had a definite pur- 

135 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

pose, clearly understood, and splendidly ful- 
filled. 

Some of the most advanced schools of ag- 
riculture, professionally, have practically 
dropped mathematics out of the course as 
being unnecessary. Such a move, in my 
judgment, is highly premature. Thorough 
classroom drill and sound mental discipline 
are still, and alw^ays will be, prime needs for 
every college student, yet these are the ele- 
ments most conspicuously lacking from the 
present courses in practical agriculture. It 
is true that drill courses in crops and live 
stock can be made and bring good results in 
the hands of an occasional teacher; but it is 
exceedingly doubtful if any of them can ever 
supply the mental training of algebra and 
geometry. 

In any college one of the most serious 
practical problems of teaching consists in 
grading up, during the first year, the mate- 
rial brought together from widely separated 
sources. Some of it is always unfit. There 
are always some students who will not work 
and others who simply have not the capacity 
for college training. Even that portion of 
136 



THE COURSE OF STUDY — MATERIALS 

the material which is perfectly good has to 
be shaken down together, unified, and 
brought into a smoothly working class. For 
these indispensable duties nothing serves so 
well as mathematics. 

There is, of course, the possibility of re- 
quiring too much mathematics — of making 
it a burden to the agricultural course. It is 
often asserted that a pupil may be apt in live 
stock or cookery, though very weak in al- 
gebra ; and that such a student should not be 
thrown out of his professional course be- 
cause he fails in an unnecessary subject. 
This specious argument has been greatly 
overworked. After twenty years of teach- 
ing in technical subjects I am prepared to 
say that the pupil who is weak in mathe- 
matics, and who cannot or will not (fre- 
quently the latter) understand quadratics or 
the translation of trigonometric functions, is 
not capable of sound, intelligent work in any 
field. 

My own judgment is very clear that every 
agricultural college curriculum should in- 
clude stiff work in pure mathematics 
throughout the freshman year. 

137 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 
THE HUMANITIES 

Every professional student should take as 
much as possible of subjects outside his pro- 
fessional curriculum. It is impossible to get 
too much, unless indeed his professional in- 
terest is dulled and his ambition diverted to 
dubious and unprofitable channels. Such 
subjects, chosen to give him breadth 
of view and variety of interests, need 
have no practical connection with his major 
study. Perhaps the farther from it the 
better. 

This broadening interest in other affairs, 
in other peoples, and in other times, is gen- 
uine culture. As such it is highly desirable 
to every man. We need only to guard 
against the foolish notion, elsewhere chal- 
lenged, that this is the only kind of culture, 
or that it has to be followed in order to off- 
set the ^'narrowing" effects of professional 
study. 

Under this term, "the humanities," are 
usually included English, modern and 
ancient languages, literature, history, eco- 
nomics and sociology. These serve, how- 

138 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

ever, rather different purposes in the course 
of study. 

English is generally considered obligatory 
in every course of study. Some good people 
say it should be required throughout the col- 
lege course and always throughout the high- 
school course. Such persons, however, usu- 
ally have in mind a practical rather than a 
cultural result. They wish to give the col- 
lege graduate a working command of cor- 
rect English. How far current instruction 
falls short of the ideal is painfully known to 
every reader of examination papers. The 
business men who every summer are flooded 
with letters of application from new gradu- 
ates are deeply disgusted with the gross in- 
eptitude shown in the use of the mother 
tongue. The opinion is general amongst 
educators of all ranks that there is something 
radically wrong with present methods of 
teaching English, an opinion which I share 
without being able to suggest a remedy. 

Under these circumstances, however, It 
seems hardly wise to require students in a 
professional course to take English during 
every term, seeing the result is so small. It 

139 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

would seem a fair suggestion, however, that 
some of the English instruction be given in 
direct connection with the professional 
work. When a student has to report on the 
feeding and management of a pen of poultry 
he has something to say, and clean-cut, ef- 
fective expression of his ideas has some im- 
portance to him. It is a situation very much 
more favorable to instruction than that in 
which the teacher requires the pupil to write 
2,000 words on the Peloponnesian War. 

A course in English literature which will 
awaken a living interest in good reading is 
invaluable ; one which merely gives an ency- 
clopedic conspectus of authors' names, 
works and dates is worse than useless. 

MODERN LANGUAGES 

French and German are taught in practi- 
cally all the high schools and colleges. 
Italian and Spanish also are frequently of- 
fered. Obviously they are considered im- 
portant. 

In the high schools modern languages are 
important chiefly as a means for getting into 
140 



THE COURSE OF STUDY — MATERIALS 

college. Pupils never gain a working 
knowledge of any foreign language by high- 
school study only, and the culture value of 
high-school French or German is as near 
zero as anybody can count. 

In college French and German are often 
justified on the ground that they are neces- 
sary to the study of other subjects. This 
claim is pure moonshine. French and Ger- 
man are not necessary and scarcely helpful 
at any point in undergraduate work. What 
is more, not one student out of a hundred 
ever gets a working knowledge of these lan- 
guages from his college study. 

In graduate study and research, French 
and German are usually desirable, some- 
times necessary. Universal experience 
shows that the working knowledge of mod- 
ern languages required in these circum- 
stances can be much more economically 
gained from other sources than from the 
high-school and college courses. 

The fact that the schools of France and 
Germany secure much greater efficiency in 
their teaching of modern languages indi- 
cates that American methods of instruction 
141 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

may be improved. It may be suspected that 
American teachers have aimed too much at 
"culture," and have sought too immediate 
results in that field. 

The real service performed by the lan- 
guages in school is neither in their alleged 
practical use in studying other subjects nor 
in the infinitesimal grain of culture which 
they yield, but in the daily classroom drill 
which they give. This constant grind of 
paradigms and vocabularies has a very salu- 
tary effect upon pupils of high-school and 
college age. Moreover, this helps to correct 
the deficiencies of the courses in agriculture, 
which are especially weak in effective drills. 

In this field the languages serve the same 
purpose as mathematics, though not so well. 
Furthermore — and this fact should be em- 
phasized — Latin and Greek are distinctly 
superior to French and German for the uses 
of mental drill. If languages are to be re- 
tained in the curriculum for the purposes 
which they actually serve, then Latin 
should be used instead of French and 
German. 

On the whole it seems that there should be 
142 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

no required language, other than English, 
in the undergraduate agricultural course; 
but that elective French, German and Latin 
ought to be offered, and that in general these 
should be taken by a few students who al- 
ready have considerable proficiency in them. 
That is, a girl coming to college with a fair 
command of French — perhaps from a 
French-speaking family — might well study 
French in college. Or a boy who has al- 
ready shown marked facility in Latin should 
continue that subject in school. In such 
cases it is quite desirable that the language 
work come in the first year. Postponement 
to the junior or senior year involves great 
waste of effort. 

ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY 

The subjects of economics and sociology 
are important if not vital in all modern 
high-school and college courses. They are 
taught, however, from three very different 
points of view. Some teachers make a 
purely humanitarian or cultural appeal; 
others discuss the subjects wholly from the 

143 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

scientific point of view ; still others are inter- 
ested primarily in the political result — in 
the development of good citizenship. 

In the agricultural course of study all 
these things have a value. Probably the 
scientific treatment is least valuable; agri- 
cultural students can get their notions of 
science more clearly elsewhere. Their 
courses are apt to be already unbalanced in 
the direction of science. The cultural use of 
these subjects is important; but in state col- 
leges and public high schools the endeavor 
to develop intelligent citizenship is most ob- 
viously proper. 

It may be suggested here that the field of 
economics and sociology is badly infested 
with fads — current politics, half-baked re- 
ligious doctrines, eugenics and what not. 
Such stuff should be wholly banned from 
the classroom. A few simple courses deal- 
ing with universal principles, developed 
preferably from concrete examples, and en- 
forced by practical drills, would make these 
subjects indispensable. 

History, when it can be taught by a live 
teacher, is an invaluable culture subject. 
144 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

When taught by rote by a cheap, dull peda- 
gog it is far worse than nothing. 

SUMMARY 

Reviewing this discussion of the materials 
of the course of study we may state our con- 
clusions as follows: 

1. The technical material (agriculture, 
horticulture, domestic arts) is essential for 
vocational training. Also it has a large cul- 
tural value. 

2. These materials should have a consid- 
erably larger place in the curriculum. 

3. Still more important is it that the 
methods of technical teaching be improved. 

4. Furthermore, the technical subjects 
must command the whole curriculum. All 
other subjects must support them and be 
taught in sympathy with the professional 
point of view. 

5. The whole theory of agricultural 
teaching has changed in recent times. At 
first the intention was to teach "practical" 
farming; then came the idea of teaching 
"book farming" ; there followed the ideal of 

145 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

agriculture as a science, to be taught as a 
science; there is now emerging the ideal of 
agriculture as a profession, to be taught as 
a body of technic. 

6. Science is often offered as the founda- 
tion for agricultural teaching, and from this 
point of view would be required in the early 
part of the course. But this is false peda- 
gogy. Science is not and never has been a 
practicable foundation for agricultural 
teaching. Science rather offers detached 
explanations of sundry observations in agri- 
culture, and may become the correlating 
principle in agricultural practice. In 
either role it should follow agriculture in 
the curriculum. 

7. Generally speaking, this correlation 
ought to be made by the teachers who lay the 
observational and technical foundations. In 
short, the science should be taught by the 
technical teachers. 

8. Mathematical courses are not practi- 
cally necessary to agricultural courses. 
They are exceedingly valuable, however, 
for purposes of discipline, and for this pur- 

146 



THE COURSE OF STUDY— MATERIALS 

pose should be available through the fresh- 
man year in college. 

9. Students of agriculture and home eco- 
nomics should take the largest possible 
amount of humanitarian subjects — as much 
as can be taken without interfering unrea- 
sonably with their professional courses. 

10. English should be required in consid- 
erable amounts, but should be much better 
taught. It should be brought into more direct 
connection with the professional work. 

11. Modern languages are now widely 
used in college curricula for cultural results 
and as a means of studying other subjects. 
For the former purpose their failure is rela- 
tive; for the latter, complete. The one sub- 
stantial service which they do render lies in 
the thorough classroom drill which they 
provide. For this purpose Latin is alto- 
gether superior to modern languages, and 
mathematics superior to either. 

12. Economics and sociology are valu- 
able especially in developing intelligent cit- 
izenship. In this field popular fads are to 
be avoided and instruction bent chiefly to 
fundamental principles. 

H7 



CHAPTER VII 

COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGE- 
MENT 

HAVING now discussed the materials 
from which our agricultural course of 
study is to be constructed, we have to con- 
sider how these are to be arranged in order 
to secure the best results. 

Mathematics as a required subject has 
been reduced to a minimum or wholly elimi- 
nated from the most advanced agricultural 
courses. This represents a distinct and log- 
ical line of progress, but the writer confesses 
to a belief in fairly large allowances of 
mathematics, at least for college men. It 
may be that women in domestic science 
courses have less need of mathematical 
training — perhaps also less capacity for it — 
but most bright college men find a discipline 
and a mental outlook here which no other 
subject can supply. The discipline of math- 
ematics has a very high human value; and 
148 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

if vigorously applied in the freshman year 
assists materially in weeding out the unpre- 
pared, lazy, incompetent and undesirable 
material which creeps into every annual en- 
tering class. 

For this reason I believe that mathe- 
matics, including algebra, geometry and 
trigonometry, should be required of all agri- 
cultural students, that the courses should be 
thorough and stiff, and that they should con- 
tinue through the freshman year. 

Beyond the freshman year there should 
be some elective mathematics. Such work 
will be of practical service to certain stu- 
dents of chemistry, microbiology, landscape 
gardening, etc. ; but mainly it will leave 
open an inspiring field of advanced study to 
a number of mathematically minded men. 
In universities all this elective mathematics 
can easily be secured from the engineering 
schools or other allied colleges. In straight 
agricultural schools only a limited number 
of elective courses can be economically of- 
fered. 

English of some sort should be required 
during a considerable portion of the four- 
149 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

year course. If the teachers of English 
could agree amongst themselves what the 
character of this work should be, or if there 
were more obvious efficiency in the work 
usually given, a mere outsider might feel 
more confidence in expressing opinions on 
this subject. In general, it may be said that 
a somewhat specialized effort is required in 
teaching English in any technical school. 
The situation is plainly different from what 
it is in classical schools. Probably the most 
effective methods will bring the English 
teaching into closer correlation with the pro- 
fessional courses. Instead of studying 
chiefly Shakespeare and Chaucer, the stu- 
dents will study to express themselves 
clearly, grammatically and forcibly in their 
reports on cover crops or cream separators. 
While the principal effort should be spent 
to secure clean construction in writing and 
speaking, English literature should be by no 
means neglected. But it must be doubted 
whether the accepted courses, dealing 
chiefly with Elizabethan worthies and 
purely literary fancies, offer the best mate- 
rial for strictly literary studies for honest, 
150 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

Open-minded men interested primarily in 
live stock, improved grain farming, and the 
living, working world of today. It is a fair 
suggestion that the splendid modern litera- 
ture of country life would find a heartier 
response and leave a deeper love of reading 
and of bookish culture. 

Finally — to dismiss this subject very 
briefly — it is strongly suspected in many 
quarters that the meagerness of the results 
generally secured in the college teaching of 
English is largely due to an insufficient 
teaching force. There are usually quite too 
few teachers for the work, insomuch that 
ninety per cent of the themes written by the 
students are never even read by instructors. 
(This is a semi-official report.) Instead of 
such inexcusable negligence on the part of 
the college, each theme written by a student 
should be carefully discussed and criticized 
in detail by the instructor in personal con- 
ference with the student. If this means an 
increase of two hundred per cent in the 
teaching force of the English Department it 
still ought to be done. 

Considerable additional expense ought to 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

be incurred, furthermore, in raising the 
grade of the instructors. At present the 
teaching staff in English is made up largely 
of raw and recent graduates from the classi- 
cal courses. It would be quite easy — given 
a proper allowance of funds — to find men 
of greater maturity, preferably such as have 
had enough technical training in agriculture 
to have some sympathy for agricultural stu- 
dents, who could give their pupils the per- 
sonal counsel and poise which they so sadly 
need at this point. 

Modern languages should be within reach 
of all college students as elective subjects, 
but should by no means be required of all 
students in agriculture and domestic science. 
This judgment is now widely accepted by 
leading educators within and without the 
agricultural ranks. College students who 
are to take modern language should nearly 
always begin with it at the opening of the 
freshman year and continue without break 
until they are ready to drop the work finally. 
This will mean, of course, that there must be 
some opportunity for elective studies during 
the freshman year. 

152 



COURSE OF STUDY — ARRANGEMENT 

In advising students as to the election of 
modern languages, it should be the policy to 
place no student in any language except he 
has had considerable preparation in it be- 
fore entering college and except he shows 
further some distinct love and aptitude for 
the language elected. College time is too 
precious to be wasted over a droning study 
of paradigms and juvenile vocabularies. 
This goes with the fact — now generally com- 
ing to light — that in the practical pursuit 
of professional courses in agriculture and 
home economics foreign languages have a 
wholly negligible value. 



''the humanities' 



This rather vague but otherwise accep- 
table term, may be used to designate such 
subjects as history, civics, economics and 
sociology. They have a very definite pur- 
pose and place in the curriculum. That 
purpose is training for citizenship. Surely 
if any schools are under obligation to train 
men and women to be good citizens it is that 
group of colleges founded on the Morrill 

153 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

acts and specially endowed by federal and 
state governments for public service. 

But first, it needs to be emphasized that 
the good citizen is primarily the serviceable 
man, and that the prime service rendered by 
nearly every man lies in his daily labor in 
his vocation. If the farmer conserves the 
resources of his land and produces yearly 
full crops of grain and milk and meat to 
feed the nation he has done the greatest and 
most important thing which the world can 
expect of him. Moreover, when he does 
this the way is opened and made easy to the 
other fields of more purely altruistic service 
which people usually have in mind when 
they speak of good citizenship. The effi- 
cient farmer — the man who keeps good stock 
and grows good crops — is the man who exer- 
cises the best influence in politics, school im- 
provement, grange work and the church. 

To do his best, however, his mind should 
be directed to public afifairs; he ought to 
know how such matters concern him and his 
family; and he ought to have a firm grasp 
of the principles of economics and sociology 
on which sound public policies are based. 

154 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

Every man needs such training in the 
basic principles of citizenship, and the col- 
lege is altogether the best place to get it. 
Three topics are especially desirable for col- 
lege study, viz., (a) common law and prin- 
ciples of government, with special refer- 
ence to local government; (b) principles of 
economics; (c) principles of sociology. 

There ought to be ample opportunity in 
every good agricultural college also to study 
the special applications of economics and 
sociology now coming to be known as rural 
economics and sociology. 

There is bound to be some heated con- 
troversy as to whether the courses in general 
principles should precede or follow the 
courses in rural economics and sociology. 
The theory generally recognized in science 
teaching would require the general courses 
to be given first; but the theory now held by 
students of education would place the more 
concrete topics first and the courses in gen- 
eral principles afterward. 

This issue becomes more acute because in 
most curricula it will be desirable to include 
two or three required courses placed prob- 

155 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

ably in the sophomore year, leaving all other 
courses in economics, sociology, history and 
government elective in the junior and senior 
years. My own view is that, providing the 
subjects of rural economics and rural sociol- 
ogy can be made very definite, very concrete 
as to matter, and can be thoroughly wxll 
taught by instructors who know the differ- 
ence between sophomores and seniors, then 
these topics should be preferred for the 
sophomore required courses. But this is a 
big and an important reservation. If these 
conditions cannot be fully met it will be bet- 
ter to place in the sophomore year required 
courses in the simple fundamental principles 
of general economics, government and 
sociology. 

MILITARY REQUIREMENTS 

The law under which most of the agricul- 
tural colleges are supported requires the 
teaching of military tactics and the main- 
tenance of military drill. And since the 
work has to be given it should be thoroughly 
well done. The law ought to be observed in 
perfectly good faith. 

IS6 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

It has to be said, however, that this mili- 
tary training does not appeal to the judg- 
ment or conscience of the large anti-mili- 
tarist world, that it is usually a hardship in 
the course of study, and that it is sometimes 
an intolerable nuisance. When any college 
is so unfortunate as to gain the assignment 
of a bumptious and bigoted military officer 
the situation becomes very trying indeed. 
On the other hand, a tactful and humanly 
sympathetic military officer can do the col- 
lege to which he is attached a world of good. 
His influence with healthy boys, particu- 
larly in the way of solid discipline, can be 
made exceedingly valuable. 

As a problem of course of study making, 
however, the military requirements are to 
be kept down to the minimum. Drill may 
be kept on the elective list for the benefit of 
those few men who like to wear gold braid 
and a sword. 

GENERAL SCIENCE 

Up to the present time agricultural 
courses have been designed upon a founda- 

157 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

tlon of general science, especially "natural" 
or biological science. Many persons have 
supposed indeed that the curriculum should 
consist mainly of science, and that the 
science teachers could make, in the course 
of their scientific discussions, all necessary 
applications of these scientific principles to 
agricultural practice. One reactionary edu- 
cator has recently asserted that within ten 
years agriculture will be taught only in the 
laboratories of physics and chemistry. 

A more modern view is that science is the 
foundation of agricultural practice and of 
household economics, and as such should 
precede all professional courses in the cur- 
riculum. This is probably the prevailing 
view of the moment in agricultural college 
faculties. The fact that this theory fails 
entirely in practice and that it is prepos- 
terous when viewed from the standpoint of 
modern pedagogy, is sufficiently discussed 
elsewhere. It is proper, however, to men- 
tion these erroneous ideas as we endeavor to 
place science in its proper place in the agri- 
cultural curriculum. 

Our difficulty arises mainly in meeting 

158 



COURSE OF STUDY — ARRANGEMENT 

two contradictory tendencies, both of which 
are perfectly sound if taken by themselves. 
While from the standpoint of pedagogic 
theory the concrete courses in agricultural 
practice should precede the work in science, 
in actual present conditions the science can 
be more effectively taught in the freshman 
and sophomore years than the agricultural 
courses can. Any good teacher can give 
good snappy freshman courses in chemistry, 
physics or botany; but the teachers who can 
give solid, workable courses in farm practice 
to classes of two or five hupdred freshmen 
are as scarce as wisdom teeth in poultry. 
Thus we shall probably continue for years 
to give considerable science work in the first 
two years, simply because it can be well 
taught and because it can be handled by stu- 
dents of those grades. 

Two observations are to be made at this 
point: First, the particular courses are not 
very important, and because no student can 
or should cover every field of science, they 
should mostly be elective. Second, these 
science courses should be kept as free as pos- 
sible of so-called "practical applications." 

159 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

Practical applications are probably the best 
foundation for science in a closely co-or- 
dinated course when science and practical 
agriculture are taught by the same teacher; 
but in our highly differentiated college or- 
ganization it will be better for the technical 
departments to make all the necessary appli- 
cations of science to practice. 

The science of the first two years thus be- 
comes, by hard necessity, a sort of general 
training not closely correlated with the pro- 
fessional work. The average student should 
take one such science course in each term of 
the first two years. He should be free to 
elect, under proper advice, from a list in- 
cluding physics, chemistry, botany, physiol- 
ogy, zoology and geology. 

PROFESSIONAL STUDIES 

This part of the subject must be intro- 
duced with the statement that the main 
problems in agricultural teaching have to 
do with teachers and methods rather than 
with the curriculum. In general, there is 
ample space in the curriculum for all agri- 
i6o 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

cultural material needed, and no very 
serious difficulty in having this material 
placed at the most desirable points. 

In reference to the course of study, the 
main difficulty has been a lack of pedagogic 
differentiation. No careful distinction has 
been made between professional material 
(agricultural, horticultural, and home eco- 
nomics) suitable to the freshman or the 
senior year. When agriculture is taught to 
freshmen about the same material and the 
same methods are used as in teaching sen- 
iors. At this point improvement is highly 
desirable. Let us therefore make a study of 
our materials to see what should be their 
proper distribution throughout the four- 
year college curriculum. 

Every catalog from the leading agricul- 
tural colleges nowadays shows a wealth of 
material arranged in multitudinous courses. 
The materials at least have been highly dif- 
ferentiated, even when no thought has been 
taken to their proper position in the course 
of study. All these various courses, how- 
ever, may be classified without great diffi- 
culty into the following groups, the arrange- 
i6i 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

ment being made on the basis of their peda- 
gogic requirements. 

Group I. Observation Courses. These 
are characterized by the direct observation 
of materials, combined usually with detailed 
description. The best examples of this 
group are the many highly effective courses 
in judging, such as stock judging, poultry 
judging, corn judging, fruit judging. 

These observation courses may be advan- 
tageously divided into two groups: (a) 
Those which deal simply with materials, 
(b) Those which deal mainly with proc- 
esses or phenomena. In the second group 
would come such work as testing farm ma- 
chinery, dynamometer tests, simple work 
with farm motors, and in the woman's col- 
lege, work with sewing machines, etc., etc. 

These courses belong naturally In the 
freshman year. 

Group 2. Handicraft Courses, char- 
acterized by the active motor participation 
of the student in some going project. This 
would include courses in propagation of 
plants, management of incubators, Babcock 
testing, garden work, greenhouse work. All 
162 



COURSE OF STUDY — ARRANGEMENT 

manner of instruction by the "project 
method" would belong characteristically to 
this group. This type of instruction is 
highly important, even though difficult, and 
will probably be much more extensively de- 
veloped in the future. 

Work of this kind is especially adapted 
to the sophomore year. 

Group J. Technical Science Courses, in- 
volving chiefly the direct application of 
scientific principles or scientific methods to 
problems of agriculture or household eco- 
nomics. Courses in stock feeding, in stock 
breeding and in silviculture may be men- 
tioned as examples. In the woman's col- 
lege most courses in sanitation and in cook- 
ery belong in this group. 

In practice there will always be difficulty 
in drawing a distinction between courses of 
this character and those belonging to 
Group 5 following, but the theoretical dif- 
ference is wide and important. Courses in 
this group deal with science methods and 
involve direct scientific reasoning, while 
those of Group 5 deal with practice and in- 
volve personal judgment — a quite different 
163 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

mental process. It is exceedingly desirable 
that teachers should distinguish between 
these mental processes in their instruction, 
and desirable furthermore that each partic- 
ular course should be given one character or 
the other. Courses of Group 3 belong prop- 
erly in the junior year. 

Group 4- Constructive Design. There 
are a number of courses in every college in 
which the characteristic mental process in- 
volves constructive design. Drainage prob- 
lems and farm engineering, the design of 
farm building, machine designing, and most 
courses in landscape gardening offer good 
examples. In the woman's college costume 
designing, kitchen planning and house- 
hold furnishing generally belong in this 
group. 

Courses of this character should be placed 
preferably in the junior year. 

Group 5- Professional Practice, involv- 
ing a correlation of many factors, mainly 
about the problems of crop production; and 
characterized further by a heavy emphasis 
upon personal judgment. (The question of 
whether a certain orchard needs more nitro- 
164 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

gen, or whether buckwheat should replace 
clover as a cover crop, or whether a certain 
piece of land would be better for strawber- 
ries or peaches, or whether a certain field is 
too dry or too wet to be plowed, is a question 
of judgment and not primarily one of scien- 
tific reasoning.) In this group would come 
all the leading farm practice courses, such 
as the courses in fruit growing, market gar- 
dening, crop production, live stock manage- 
ment, poultry husbandry, farm administra- 
tion, etc. 

These courses belong distinctively to the 
junior and senior years. 

Group 6. Synthetic or General Courses. 
Every student before leaving college should 
have some one course which would give him 
a point of view high enough from which to 
see the correlation and meaning of all pro- 
fessional work. It is hard to express this in 
terms of materials. Such instruction de- 
pends almost wholly upon the teacher, on 
his breadth of view, on his liberality of 
sympathy, and on his ability to inspire pu- 
pils. In a general way it may be said that 
farm administration properly taught will 

165 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

achieve this synthetic result. In the wom- 
an's college household management prop- 
erly taught will serve the purpose. Certain 
courses in plant breeding or genetics serve 
very well, especially when they take the 
broad view of evolution and cosmogony. 
The course in genetics, however, serves bet- 
ter for the synthesis of scientific ideas than 
for establishing a proper point of view for 
professional studies. 

It hardly needs to be said that only one or 
two courses of this character need to be in- 
cluded in a curriculum, and that they should 
be placed at the very end. 

TABULAR STATEMENT 

We will get a clearer idea of what this 
theorizing comes to if we will run over one 
or two catalogs of modern agricultural col- 
leges and classify the courses on this pro- 
posed basis. The following list is made up 
in this manner, but only leading courses of 
fixed character have been included. They 
show the following results; the assignment 
to years is wholly ours, based on the peda- 
i66 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

gogic requirements of the courses and not 
on the arrangement shown in the catalogs 
consulted. 

FRESHMAN YEAR 



Group I — Observation Studies 
Stock judging Butter and cheese judging 

Fruit judging 

SOPHOMORE YEAR 

Group 2 — Handicraft Courses 
Seed testing Plant propagation 

Testing dairy products Sewing 

Buttermaking Dressmaking 

Cheese making 



JUNIOR YEAR 



Group 3- 
Farm soils 
Soil physics 
Soil surveys 
Farm crops 
Cereal crops 
Forage crops 
Agrostology 
Systematic pomology 
Stock feeding 
Animal nutrition 
Stock breeding 
Types and breeds 



-Technical Science 

Poultry anatomy 
Poultry feeding 
Horticultural manufacture 
Plant breeding 
Crop improvement 
Climatology 
(Home economics) : 

Foods 

Dietetics 

Textiles 

Sanitation 

Personal hygiene 



167 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



JUNIOR YEAR 



Group 4 — Constructive Design 



Farm machinery 
Power machinery 
Motors and tractors 
Orchard machinery 
Farm drainage 
Farm mechanics 
Farm buildings 
Greenhouse construction 



Landscape gardening 
(Home economics) : 

House construction 
decoration 

Costume designing 

Millinery 

Basketry 



and 



SENIOR YEAR 



Group 5 — Professional Practice 



Practical farm management 

Live stock management 

Management of dairy cattle 

Poultry husbandry 

Dry farming practice 

Irrigation farming 

Irrigation institutions 

Crop production 

Potato growing 

Orchard practice 

Fruit growing 

Viticulture 

Small fruit culture 

Nut culture 

Sub-tropical pomology 



Forcing vegetables 
Vegetable growing 
Market gardening 
Commercial truck gardening 
Floriculture 
Commercial pomology 
Milk production 
Dairy practice 
Creamery practice 
(Home economics) : 

Household administration 

Catering 

Home nursing and invalid 
cookery 



It will be seen at a glance that the differ- 
ent groups are not equally filled, but this is 
not the fault of our classification, but the 
1 68 



COURSE OF STUDY— ARRANGEMENT 

deep and serious fault of agricultural in- 
struction throughout the agricultural col- 
leges of America. There is an abundance 
of material — probably too many highly 
specialized courses — for the senior and 
junior years, and a very serious dearth of 
courses for the freshman and sophomore 
years. 

This difficulty is due primarily to the fact 
that nearly all instructors in agriculture, 
horticulture and home economics have their 
minds fixed on their subjects rather than on 
their students or on the best methods of 
teaching those students. That there is no in- 
herent difficulty in presenting agricultural 
or home economics subjects to students of 
the earlier grades is sufficiently attested by 
the elaborate and successful courses now 
given in the high schools. One of the big 
and crying needs in every agricultural col- 
lege is for the development of strong courses 
in Groups i and 2 for the freshman and 
sophomore years. 

The courses hitherto given in the fresh- 
man and sophomore years have usually been 
selected from Groups 3, 4 and 5 — perhaps 
169 



THE AGRICULTURAL CXDLLEGE 

oftenest from Group 5. These have natu- 
rally proved obviously inefficient. They 
were bound to. The arrangement was logi- 
cally and psychologically unsound. 

THE COMPLETE COURSE 

Let us now bring together all these mate- 
rials — the science, the English, the mathe- 
matics, the agriculture — into one complete 
course of study for the usual four-year col- 
lege period. If we assume the customary 
method of reckoning college credits we will 
require approximately 120 credits for grad- 
uation, or thirty credits in each year. Our 
course of study will then look something 
like this : 

Four-Year Course 

(120 Credits) 
Freshman Year — 30 Credits 

Agriculture or home economics 6 

Science 6 

Mathematics 6 

English 6 

Military requirement 
170 



COURSE OF STUDY — ARRANGEMENT 

Electives 6 

Modern language 
Additional science 
Additional agriculture or home eco- 
nomics 
History 
Sophomore Year — 30 Credits 

Agriculture or home economics 6 

Science 8 

English 4 

Economics, sociology and government 6 
Military requirement 

Electives 6 

Modern language 
Additional science 
Additional agriculture or home eco- 
nomics 
Junior Year — 30 Credits 

Agriculture or home economics 12 

English 4 

Economics, sociology and government 6 

Electives 8 

Additional agriculture 

Additional home economics 

Science 

Modern language 

171 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

English literature 
History 
Economics 
Sociology 
Senior Year — 30 Credits 

Agriculture or home economics 12 

Economics, sociology and government 6 
Electives 12 

Additional agriculture 

Additional home economics 

Science 

English 

Modern language 

History 

Additional economics and sociology 



172 



CHAPTER VIII 
METHODS OF TEACHING 

AGRICULTURE, horticulture and do- 
mestic science are to be taught, of 
course, by the same methods used in the 
teaching of other subjects. Some special 
adaptations are possibly necessary, but these 
are of relatively small importance. How- 
ever, agricultural teachers are lamentably 
weak on these general methods of teaching. 
Not one in a hundred has ever had the 
slightest training in pedagogic methods or 
has been told the first principles of the 
teaching art. If the new professor of agron- 
omy or market gardening makes out to be 
a good teacher it is by force of a strong 
native personality, plus considerable powers 
of adaptation. 

It lies outside the plan of this book to dis- 
cuss general principles of pedagogics; but 
the methods of teaching agriculture and do- 
mestic science so obviously need improve- 

173 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

ment that it is impossible to avoid some con- 
sideration of these questions. It seems best, 
therefore, to present the subject in brief re- 
view from the standpoint of the agricultural 
teacher. Three principal methods are fol- 
lowed in modern college and high-school 
teaching. These are: 

1. The use of a textbook with recitations. 

2. The lecture, with occasional oral 
quizzes and written tests. 

3. Laboratory work of various kinds. 
Very few courses, even in the lower 

grades, are given wholly by either one of 
these methods. Exclusively text-book 
courses are sometimes used in high school, 
and exclusively lecture courses unfortu- 
nately persist in college circles; but gener- 
ally the live teacher uses several different 
methods in each course. In large part this 
represents the teacher's efifort to realize the 
advantages and minimize the disadvantages 
of each method. 

THE TEXTBOOK 

The textbook presents perhaps the oldest 
and simplest method. It is better suited to 

174 



METHODS OF TEACHING 

elementary work, and for this reason should 
be used more frequently in the earlier years 
of the college course than in the later years, 
and much more frequently in the high 
school than in the college. 

The first difficulty arises in the lack of 
acceptable textbooks. It is infinitely more 
difficult to make a good college text for dairy 
husbandry than for geometry or Latin. 
But with the thousands of earnest attempts 
made in the last few years a few pretty good 
textbooks have appeared, accompanied, to 
be sure, by a multitude of inferior books. A 
clear majority of these books are marred by 
the endeavor of the authors to ride two 
horses — to make at once a book for class use 
and a readable, popular, practical work for 
farmers. The classroom textbook ought to 
be entirely different from the popular ex- 
position, especially when it is to be used in 
the lower grades, where the textbook is most 
needed. 

A primary problem in the preparation of 
the textbook comes in the presentation of ac- 
curate, concise, definite statements. Excep- 
tions and qualifications may be necessary for 

175 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

critical and comprehensive treatment; but 
a textbook need not be critical or compre- 
hensive; instead, it must present essential 
truths, and it should be graphic and sug- 
gestive. The ideal textbook, instead of giv- 
ing a complete and carefully balanced dis- 
cussion of some agricultural field, should of- 
fer a series of selected topics, each essential 
and significant, and forming a proper basis 
for an efifective class exercise. 

Each textbook, moreover, ought to be 
adapted to some particular grade of teach- 
ing. A book on pomology for the high 
school should be wholly unfit for use in col- 
lege. It is one of the absurdities of present 
practice to find Bailey's "Principles of Fruit 
Growing" used in all the grades, from the 
kindergarten to the graduate school. The 
book is better for fruit growers than for stu- 
dents an3rway. 

Just at the present time laboratory man- 
uals are needed more than textbooks, but 
there will long be a big field for new agri- 
cultural and domestic science textbooks of 
the right sort 

176 



METHODS OF TEACHING 
THE LECTURE 

The lecture course is beyond all compari- 
son the laziest and least effective method of 
teaching ever invented. Beside the modern 
lecture course those old sociable dialogs be- 
tween Socrates and the Greek boys under the 
shade of the spreading plane trees of Athens 
were the paragon of pedagogic efficiency. 

There are, however, certain reasons why 
the lecture method is persistently and exten- 
sively used. It is easy. Indeed, nothing 
could be easier. A young instructor be- 
comes Interested in some subject, say the 
production of certified milk or the growing 
of broom corn. There is, of course, no text- 
book on the subject. But the young man is 
full of the matter — just bubbling over. Six- 
teen students signify a wish for the course. 
Sixteen students can be found anywhere to 
take anything. It requires only thirty lec- 
tures, possibly only twenty-five, with field 
trips and written tests, to make a "two- 
credit" course. The young certified milk or 
broom corn enthusiast can talk an hour 
twice a week on his hobby and not half try — 

177 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

SO here we go! If he makes friends with his 
students they will accept enthusiasm for in- 
formation (it may really be better), and 
entertainment for discipline. It is wonder- 
ful how easily a likable young instructor can 
get away with that game. 

To be sure, some of the worst lecture 
courses are given by the oldest professors. 
Which reminds me of the Frau Professor of 
the German university, who told her cronies 
how shamefully the modern students 
neglected her worthy husband. "Ah," said 
she, "the students are not what they used to 
be. Forty years ago, when the Herr Pro- 
fessor was only Privat Dozent, he used to 
have a hundred students in his courses. But 
now he has only six or eight, while the stu- 
dents all follow after the popular foolish- 
ness. It certainly is not the Herr Professor's 
fault, for he reads the same lectures now that 
he did then, when he had his students by 
hundreds." 

After all, the main reason why the lecture 
course persists is that, especially in many 
rapidly advancing technical subjects, it is 
the only method which will keep the subject 

178 



METHODS OF TEACHING 

matter up to the times. It must be added, 
however, that the importance of keeping the 
subject matter up to the minute has been 
greatly exaggerated in the minds of many 
teachers. For teaching purposes old time- 
tried facts are usually much more service- 
able than the latest discoveries. 

Every college ought to make constant ef- 
fort to substitute better methods for the 
classroom lecture ; but much thought should 
be given, also, to the improvement of indis- 
pensable lecture courses. Much can be done 
to brighten up and vitalize dull lectures. 
Well-prepared syllabi distributed to the pu- 
pils with each lecture are usually an as- 
sistance. The main objection to the lecture 
course can be minimized by the introduc- 
tion of quantities of drill work, such as daily 
written 5-minute tests, or a regular routine 
of outside work. In my own teaching I give 
one lecture course, and it meets only twice a 
week — a very bad arrangement, of course. 
But I assign each week a problem requiring 
outside study and involving principles dis- 
cussed in the lectures. Every Tuesday 
morning each pupil is required to file a 
179 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

written report on the week's problem, and 
nothing but a doctor's or coroner's certificate 
is accepted in lieu of this report. Every lec- 
ture course should be accompanied by some 
similar drill. 

Lecture courses should be practically ex- 
cluded from high schools, and should be re- 
duced to the minimum in college, being most 
frequently used in the later college years, 
and with highly technical subjects. In the 
graduate school, where criticism in detail 
takes the place of drill upon essentials, the 
lecture method may be freely used. 

THE LABORATORY METHOD 

Science teaching brought in the laboratory 
method, supplanting the recitation-room 
method of the classics. The improvement 
was immeasurable, though it must be al- 
lowed that the recitation-room method still 
has its uses. The laboratory method has 
been widely abused for the teaching of all 
manner of subjects, such as psychology, law, 
history, civics, sociology and matrimony. 
Yet in some fashion the idea can really be 
1 80 



METHODS OF TEACHING 

adapted to almost all kinds of teaching. The 
laboratory method, in fact, is so diversely- 
used that it is the hardest of all methods 
upon which to generalize. 

Roughly, it may be said that the teachers 
of agriculture, horticulture and domestic 
science have generally imitated too closely 
the laboratory equipment and methods of 
the natural sciences. They have been 
dazzled by all those beautiful laboratories 
fitted w^ith microtomes and compound mi- 
croscopes, and have forgotten that the great 
agricultural laboratory is on the farm and 
the domestic arts laboratory in the kitchen; 
and have overlooked also the more signi- 
ficant fact that the aim of professional teach- 
ing is wholly different from the aim of 
science teaching. 

It is easily observed that the most success- 
ful laboratory courses today in the techni- 
cal departments are formed on a very differ- 
ent model. They are courses in stock judg- 
ing, in systematic pomology, in incubator 
management, in the operation of farm ma- 
chinery, etc. Some ingenuity is required 
to develop effective courses in these fields 
i8i 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

where precedents are so few, but it can be 
done. It is perhaps safe to assume that a 
subject which cannot be efTfectively arranged 
in this form had better be abandoned or 
given from the textbook. 

The ideal laboratory exercise is the one 
in which the pupil does the most work and 
the teacher does the least. A demonstration 
by the instructor is not a laboratory exercise 
at all, and should rarely be given. Each 
exercise ought to occupy each individual 
student and should occupy him fully for the 
entire period. The results should be of such 
a nature as to indicate clearly the value of 
the student's efforts. 

In the better agricultural high schools a 
new type of laboratory work has recently 
been developed w^hich is worthy of wider 
application, not only In high schools but in 
college work. It is curiously like the type 
of work long recognized as the Ideal In the 
graduate schools. This has been called the 
project method. It consists In placing the 
individual pupil In charge of a going prob- 
lem which will require his regular attention 
during a whole term or an entire year. In 
182 



METHODS OF TEACHING 

market gardening, for example, the pupil is 
assigned to the exclusive care of a specified 
garden, which he prepares, plants, culti- 
vates and harvests, and upon which he keeps 
a full set of notes and records. In poultry 
husbandry the pupil begins with an incu- 
bator and a batch of eggs ; he sees the hatch 
through the incubator, nurses the chicks 
through the brooder stage, and perhaps fat- 
tens them for squab broilers. 

This project method seems to be espe- 
cially adapted to high-school work. In the 
colleges it has been used mostly in the grad- 
uate work and in the senior grades with 
small classes, but pedagogically it would 
seem to be better suited to the freshman and 
sophomore years. Considerable readjust- 
ment of present practices will be necessary 
before this method can be widely adopted 
in the lower college years, but the idea is 
sound and the readjustment ought to be 
made. 

PROFESSIONAL CAMPS 

The great future of the agricultural col- 
leges lies in the more strictly professional 

183 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

work, more intensively organized, more lib- 
erally conceived, actuated by higher ideals. 
The best types of this work now in existence 
are to be found in the camps operated by the 
forestry schools, though the summer engin- 
eering camps of the engineering schools and 
the field camps of the mining schools are 
worth careful study. A few teachers of ani- 
mal husbandry and of farm management 
have now organized in a small way some- 
what similar methods of teaching. A group 
of students is taken into the field for a period 
of two, three or four weeks, there to live and 
work with the materials under study. 
Nearly always the time is too short, and as 
the other college work is at present ar- 
ranged, considerable friction is developed 
in handling these excursions. They ought 
to be looked on as an essential feature of the 
college work and decently provided for in 
the year's plan. Indeed, it is to be expected 
that such field camps will presently become 
a common feature of agricultural instruc- 
tion. Especially when the agricultural col- 
leges abandon the present ridiculous custom 
of a long summer vacation the opportunity 
184 



METHODS OF TEACHING 

will be given for this type of intensive pro- 
fessional work. The market gardeners may 
proceed to the best trucking section of the 
state for work in their line. The forestry 
pupils will take to the woods; the women 
students of sanitation and invalid cookery 
will go to the city hospital, where they can 
follow the best modern methods. 

Aside from the opportunity for intensive 
study in technical lines these field camps of- 
fer other opportunities of great pedagogic 
value. The routine of life in camp — prob- 
lems of sanitation, cooking meals, maintain- 
ing order, the development of simple social 
virtues — requires a kind of personal disci- 
pline of the highest order. Good teachers 
will not be slow to seize upon these oppor- 
tunities and to make of the technical camp 
a great deal more than an area of contact 
with some professional subject. 

THE HUMAN ELEMENT 

All the methods here described and all the 
others ever invented have to be used sep- 
185 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

arately or in combination as circumstances 
require. The good teacher must be re- 
sourceful and full of invention and must al- 
ways adapt his methods to the case in hand. 
If it is true that most of our agricultural 
teachers know too little about methods it is 
true also that some of the normal school 
graduates know too much. That is, they 
rely on wooden methods, which they en- 
deavor to apply without due thought for the 
peculiarities of each case. At least it must 
be said for the agricultural teachers that 
they are a resourceful lot, well supplied with 
initiative and unhampered with pedagogic 
formulas. 

Finally, it is to be emphasized that the 
teacher is always more than methods. Any 
method is merely an expedient for putting 
the pupil in contact with the instructor. 
The best method is the one which supplies 
the most points of contact. This is some- 
thing which the teachers themselves ought 
to take more seriously. It is all very well 
for the professor of dietetics or stock breed- 
ing to have a ready command of his subject 
matter. He must "have the goods," as his 
1 86 



METHODS OF TEACHING 

Students say. It is even better for him to 
have a trained facility in the methods of pre- 
senting his subject matter. But most of all, 
he must remember that the best he can do 
for his pupils is to offer them the inspiration 
of a live, clean personality. He must be en- 
thusiastic for his subject, but it is of much 
greater moment that he be humanly sympa- 
thetic with his students. 

SUMMARY 

Agriculture is taught by the same peda- 
gogic methods used in other subjects, but 
some special adaptations are desirable. 

1. The three principal methods in col- 
lege use are (a) the textbook with recita- 
tions, (b) the lecture, and (c) laboratory 
work of various kinds. 

2. The textbook is better in the lower 
grades, but should not be used alone. Much 
depends in finding a good text. Most agri- 
cultural books are not written primarily for 
classroom use. 

3. The lecture method is the poorest one, 
and should be used as little as possible. 

187 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

Every lecture course should be accompan- 
ied by some thorough and regular drill 
work. 

4. The laboratory method, too, is some- 
times abused. A common fault is to follow 
too slavishly the model set in the science 
laboratories. Field work in agriculture 
should be very different from laboratory 
work with a microscope. 

5. Professional field camps offer one of 
the best methods in sight for technical in- 
struction in agricultural and horticultural 
subjects. 

6. After all, more depends on the teacher 
than on the pedagogic methods adopted. 
The teacher must know his subject; it is 
yet more important that he should know 
how to teach ; but most important of all is it 
that he have a strong, winning personality. 



188 



CHAPTER IX 
EXTENSION TEACHING 

UNIVERSITY extension has been in 
active operation in several places for 
a good many years ; and though the system 
has not yet reached universal adoption, and 
though it has nowhere settled into any final 
form, it has evidently come to stay. 

Upon the pattern of the older university 
extension teaching was modeled the newer 
extension idea of the agricultural colleges. 
Or perhaps it would be a more accurate 
genealogy to say that the modern extension 
service of the agricultural colleges had for 
its mother the university extension idea and 
for its father the farmers' institute. Certain 
it is that, from the very first, the agricultural 
colleges have actively conducted sundry 
forms of extension work, particularly insti- 
tute lectures, publication of bulletins and 
extensive correspondence and visitation. 

All these activities blossomed into sep- 
189 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

arately organized branches of the college 
enterprise about the year 1910, and were 
established into permanent institutions with 
national co-ordination by the passage of the 
Smith-Lever act in 1914. From this time 
forth, and for many years to come, the ex- 
tension service is certain to be a highly im- 
portant branch of the college work in every 
state agricultural college. 

Radical adjustments of older extension 
plans were necessitated, however, when 
there came into existence, along with the ex- 
tension work in the colleges, the system of 
county agencies for agricultural advice. It 
is not my plan at this time to discuss the or- 
ganization and work of these county agen- 
cies, but to speak of the extension service as 
a branch of college teaching, having clearly 
in view, however, the adaptations made nec- 
essary by the system of county advisors. 

It should be recognized that the extension 
work is primarily ateaching enterprise. The 
essential difference between the original 
classroom work of the college and the newer 
extension work is that the former deals with 
pupils in residence, while the latter deals 
190 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

with pupils outside the college walls. In 
one branch the pupils come to the college; 
in the other the college goes to the pupils. 

Good extension work will therefore be 
founded on the universal principles of good 
teaching, and will tend more and more to 
take on the aspects of regular college in- 
struction. Pupils will be classified. They 
may not be called freshmen, sophomores, 
juniors or seniors; they may not be called 
engineers, "ags," "classics," "short-horns," 
or any of the other group names traditional 
to the campus. But they will be progress- 
ively assorted into groups in such a manner 
that the beginner in poultry husbandry will 
not be getting the same helps as the ad- 
vanced orchardist who specializes in 
peaches. Already in the boys' and girls' 
clubs rather careful grading appears, and 
this pedagogic principle must be carried to 
a more general and stringent application. 

Extension teaching is beginning, too, to 
make tests of its pupils to determine their 
rate of progress. We may hope that the 
examination system will never become the 
incubus that it has in many colleges, and yet 
191 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

we may see the tendency toward efficiency 
of instruction in this direction. It is im- 
portant for the extension service to know 
who is profiting by the instruction and who 
is not, and to take any measures consequently 
necessary. 

TEACHING IS DONE BY TEACHERS 

Starting from this safe principle that ex- 
tension work is teaching and should be gov- 
erned more and more by the principles of 
pedagogics, we may now point out that the 
supreme factor in teaching has always been 
the teacher. A prime problem of the exten- 
sion service, therefore, must be to develop 
the teacher — to make his personality and his 
humanity effective with the extension pu- 
pils. Up to the present writing this simple 
idea has been widely overlooked. In the 
old days of the farmers' institute there were 
popular and unpopular speakers. Some 
men made national reputations as institute 
workers, all of which meant simply that they 
had the personal touch of the teacher. In 
later times our extension organization has 
192 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

Stepped between these popular lecturers and 
their admiring audiences. The whole tend- 
ency is toward institutional instruction in- 
stead of personal human contacts. This is 
a great defect and ought to be remedied. 

In other words, it is one of the most 
serious problems of the extension organiza- 
tion to preserve and extend these human 
contacts — to bring the extension teacher just 
as near to the extension pupil as ever he can 
be brought — to minimize institutionalism 
and to magnify humanity. 

It has already been discovered by every- 
one who has had any contact with extension 
work that the selection of extension teachers 
is a matter of the greatest difficulty. Some- 
thing like surprise attached to the first dis- 
covery that men and women for this service 
must have a training even broader and more 
thorough than the teachers in the college 
classroom. They must have greater re- 
sources, for they are called upon for more 
varied and unexpected tasks. Furthermore, 
they must be men and women of the highest 
character, who may always be relied upon, 
away from the college campus and its re- 

193 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

straints, to uphold the best ideals of indus- 
try, agriculture and service. Still further, 
it is required that they be persons of win- 
ning personality. A misanthrope, a dope 
fiend or a confirmed grouch will sometimes 
be tolerated for a generation in the college 
classroom, but no crank, freak or tippler can 
be kept for a day on the extension faculty. 

It is clear that we must and soon will have 
normal courses for the special training of ex- 
tension instructors. Practical farm expe- 
rience also may be regarded as essential 
preparation for extension teachers. 

MATERIALS AND METHODS 

Turning now to the materials and meth- 
ods used in extension teaching we may ob- 
serve that experience is already showing the 
futility of certain lines of work and the 
superiority of others. The transient, de- 
tached lecture is seen to be ineffective, and 
in general the old theorem that "talk is 
cheap" seems to apply with special force in 
this field. All forms of talk, therefore, may 
be regarded as the cheapest and least useful 
means of imparting extension instruction. 
194 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

A certain amount of lecturing there must 
always be; but it should all be critically 
directed to specific points in much larger 
campaigns, where it will be supplemented 
by other methods of teaching. 

Much of the personal correspondence and 
visitation which at the outset cut such a 
large figure in extension plans, has been 
taken over now by the county bureaus. This 
work should be left wholly to them. This 
transfer of the personal contact work to the 
county agencies is a distinct privation to the 
college extension organization, inasmuch as 
it weakens the college service at a vital 
point. The college will be obliged to study 
the situation carefully in order to remedy 
this infraction of the direct lines of contact 
between the college staf¥ and the men on the 
farms. The situation, however, is both 
sound and inevitable, and simply must be 
met by more carefully planned contacts else- 
where. 

DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS 

College extension places great emphasis 
on demonstration work. It is sufficiently 

195 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

plain that showing people was a great ad- 
vance over telling them. Demonstration 
projects have grown up rapidly in some cases 
and reached gigantic proportions. These 
included projects in the use of fertilizers, in 
methods of seed selection, demonstration 
orchards, etc., etc. As a rule this demon- 
stration teaching .was a great improvement 
upon the plain talk which had preceded it, 
though we may fairly suspect that some re- 
shaping of demonstration work would have 
been necessary had not the appearance on 
the scene of the county farm bureaus made a 
general revision immediately inevitable. 

It would now appear that a considerable 
portion of the strictly demonstration proj- 
ects can easily be turned over to the county 
organizations. The state college, which acts 
as a central office for these county agencies, 
can properly co-ordinate the county activi- 
ties, can offer valuable help in organizing 
and directing county demonstrations, and 
can collate, criticize and disseminate results. 
While this transfer of demonstration proj- 
ects from state to county agencies cannot be 
made all at once, progress seems to lie in 
196 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

this direction. Readjustment should follow 
along these lines as speedily as events open 
the way. 

BOYS' AND GIRLS' CLUBS 

Just at the moment of this writing it 
would seem that the boys' and girls' club 
work is by all odds the most vital and useful 
form of extension endeavor in the field. The 
most popular groupings are in corn clubs, 
garden clubs, tomato clubs, canning clubs, 
pig clubs and poultry clubs, but many other 
problems are used to interest and instruct 
the young folks. One of the most important 
units in every extension organization should 
be the leader of this club work. 

It would appear further that, under pres- 
ent conditions, this club work should be car- 
ried forward jointly by the county bureaus 
and the state college extension agents. Lo- 
cal organization and supervision should be 
given by local agencies, while state organi- 
zation should be in the hands of the state 
officers. This state work will consist in sup- 
plying uniform methods of organization, 
197 



THE AGRICULTURy\L COLLEGE 

uniform plans of work, uniform tests of 
achievement, state reviews, state prizes, state 
reunions, etc. 

It is desirable that this club work should 
achieve some permanent organization — that 
it should be continuous and progressive, like 
the regular school work. Thus when a boy 
or a girl has finished one project he or she 
may be promoted to a more difficult one. 
These problems of a permanent curriculum 
can obviously be handled to best advantage 
by the state authorities. Much remains to 
be learned, of course, before these problems 
can be finally solved. 

ITINERANT SCHOOLS 

The typical old-time farmers' institute 
used to last for two or three days. The pro- 
gram was one of varied entertainment, in- 
spiration and instruction. In the hands of 
well-organized extension men this scheme 
has been widely replaced by the better or- 
ganized itinerant school. 

Such a school is conducted by a group of 
three to six college workers, who go to a 
198 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

particular locality and remain at the work 
for a period of at least a week, sometimes 
ten days, better a fortnight. Preliminary 
organization and publicity are usually in- 
trusted to a local committee, which com- 
mittee also makes the needful arrangements 
for hall and other equipment. 

The work of such a school is often con- 
fined to a single narrow subject, as fruit 
grading and packing, beekeeping, wheat 
growing, corn growing, poultry manage- 
ment, or some local agricultural specialty. 
At other times several different topics are 
taken up, though more than three or four 
must be considered bad management. It is 
rather desirable, however, in most places to 
offer some work especially for women; and 
the school may be advantageously sectioned 
along these lines of work for men and work 
for women. 

An essential feature of these schools is the 
extensive introduction of the usual school 
forms of organization. A formal registra- 
tion is required, with or without the pay- 
ment of a fee; attendance rolls are kept; 
quizzes and written exercises are held; 
199 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

"laboratory" work is undertaken and every 
efifort made to enlist the active participa- 
tion of the "students." While some of the 
character of the farmer's institute still per- 
sists, and while the school work must still be 
rather superficial and of limited efficiency, 
yet this type of extension service is valuable 
and ought to be continued. It is especially 
good when directed to some particular farm 
specialty, such as asparagus growing in an 
asparagus district or strawberry growing in 
a neighborhood where this crop leads all 
others. 

CORRESPONDENCE COURSES 

Whatever jokes may be spent upon the 
correspondence courses they have come to 
stay. Instruction by mail may not be the 
best that can be had, but it is certainly the 
best available to many hungry-minded peo- 
ple. When well conducted it is reasonably 
effective. 

There is every good reason why the state 
colleges should offer extended correspond- 
ence courses in agriculture and home-mak- 
200 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

ing subjects. These should be seriously 
undertaken, using the best talent and the best 
methods available. The present attitude in 
many colleges of merely tolerating the cor- 
respondence courses and of getting out of 
them with the least possible expenditure, is 
unworthy of the institutions and of the work 
itself. 

In a few colleges the correspondence 
teaching has been made eminently success- 
ful. Pupils are numbered by the thousands, 
and enthusiasm is warm. The way is wide 
open for all other college extension organi- 
zations to secure similar results. 

PUBLICATIONS 

From their Inception the agricultural col- 
leges have used the printed page for the dis- 
tribution of information. The college bulle- 
tin preceded the organization of the experi- 
ment stations ; but when the Hatch act made 
four bulletins a year obligatory the flood- 
gates were opened. Since that time there 
has been a deluge of bulletins, while the real 
problem has come to turn upon the editing, 

201 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

condensation, restriction and suppression of 
such publications. A more or less definite 
censorship has already been established in 
most states; but a committee for the preven- 
tion of bulletins would still be one of the 
most useful items to be added in more than 
one organization. 

Nevertheless, the college extension service 
is now projected into the field of bulletin 
publication. The legitimacy of this work is 
recognized by the granting of the federal 
franking privilege to extension publications. 
A considerable output of bulletins must be 
expected of every active extension organiza- 
tion; and if this branch of the service is 
carefully organized and wisely directed it 
will not be the least effective agency for 
good. 

The distinction between extension service 
bulletins and experiment station bulletins 
ought to be perfectly clear. It should fol- 
low the line of fundamental distinction be- 
tween these two branches of the college en- 
terprise. The station bulletins should be con- 
fined strictly to the report of experiments 
actually conducted by the institution, with 

202 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

only such foot-note references to other pub- 
lications as are necessary to a scientific pres- 
entation. The extension bulletins, on the 
other hand, should deal wholly with practi- 
cal and timely information. They will be 
largely statements of experience, sometimes 
compilations from many sources, always 
calculated to give the last word in some 
practical field. 

It is fair to hint that up to the present 
time the extension service has not taken this 
literary branch of its work with sufficient 
seriousness. In many instances the exten- 
sion "leaflets" are no better than passing 
essays in the commonest agricultural papers. 
Instead of being cheap scraps picked up 
about the campus — the leftovers from the 
desks of busy professors — they should be the 
best thought of critical specialists. They 
should be written with the skill of the ex- 
pert magazine contributor and edited as 
carefully as the matter which goes into the 
Saturday Evening Post. Or if this high 
journalistic standard cannot be quite 
reached it should be aimed at. 

In the future the development of the agri- 
203 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

cultural college work would seem to require 
a curtailment of experiment station bulle- 
tins, limiting the output to such as can re- 
port upon really important discoveries; 
while on the other hand the popular publi- 
cations will come from the extension organi- 
zation, this line of service being much im- 
proved as the result of careful study and 
better editing. 

VARIETY TESTING 

The extension service should properly 
take over from the experiment station many 
other lines of work besides the publication 
of popular bulletins. It has long been no- 
torious that the experiment stations were 
extensively engaged in various lines of prop- 
aganda and extension work, all popular and 
desirable enough, but utterly foreign to the 
research field and all interfering seriously 
with the legitimate experimental undertak- 
ings. It will be hard, of course, to pry these 
projects loose from the stations, no matter 
how clearly everyone may recognize the 
need. For the present we are only pointing 
204 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

out the correct policy, a policy which, in 
its general terms, no informed person will 
question. 

As an example of the reclassification here 
proposed we may cite that line of "experi- 
ment" known as variety testing. When the 
stations were first established this sort of 
work was very common. About the first 
thing done by every experiment station in 
the country was to make comparative tests of 
all the different varieties of corn, potatoes, 
tomatoes and peas in the market. This va- 
riety testing quickly ran its little day and 
came to be regarded as the lowest form of 
experiment. To a very large extent it has 
been abandoned — to a larger extent, in fact, 
than necessary. For variety testing has its 
uses. In Massachusetts, for example, we are 
deeply interested in the extension of com- 
mercial apple growing, and we would sin- 
cerely like to know what is the practical 
value of such sorts as Winter Banana, De- 
licious and Opalescent. The experiment 
station will not and should not squander its 
funds trying out every new fruit, grain and 
vegetable; but the extension service, in its 
205 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

demonstration orchards, located In various 
portions of the state, could easily secure a 
variety test of promising apples which 
would be worth much more to orchard 
planters than any single experiment station 
test anywhere. 

Such variety testing, therefore, should be 
passed over, with all its baggage, from the 
experimental to the extension branch of the 
college. And with it should go a long series 
of "experiments" which were never experi- 
ments at all, but only plausible demonstra- 
tions. Most of the fertilizer experiments 
are of this character; many of the feeding 
experiments, a good deal of the plant breed- 
ing; also dozens of other matters which will 
readily occur to those who know what goes 
on inside any college. The obvious thing to 
be done is for each institution to form a 
compact commission of intelligent men, 
preferably chosen from outside the college 
walls, and leave to this body the separation 
and realignment of the experimental and ex- 
tension work. Inside the college group ac- 
complished arrangements and personal 
prejudices are so strong as to make a logical 
206 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

reclassification practically impossible; but 
aside from these personal prejudices the task 
presents no serious difficulties. 

SURVEYS AND STATISTICAL STUDIES 

Perhaps a special word should be given 
to the field of agricultural surveys, this being 
a line of work never yet quite clearly de- 
fined or assigned. While various experi- 
ment stations have conducted surveys, some 
of them of great significance, there has been 
a plain reluctance to commit the stations to 
an extended program of this kind. Yet field 
and statistical surveys, when properly con- 
ducted and the data really digested, have a 
high value. 

It would be unwise to lay down any arbi- 
trary rule remanding all survey and statis- 
tical work to the experiment stations, or yet 
assigning it all to the extension services, yet 
it would seem clear that the latter organiza- 
tions should undertake a considerable part 
in this field. No fundamental principle ap- 
pears to apply clearly in this matter. For 
the present it would be better to leave all 
207 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

agencies free to undertake whatever surveys 
may be most plainly in line with the other 
problems which they have in hand. 

STATE- WIDE CAMPAIGNS 

Reference has already been made to the 
careful correlation between the county agen- 
cies and the college extension service de- 
manded by recent developments. The gen- 
eral principle of division is plainly that the 
county agencies should handle particular 
persons and local problems while the activi- 
ties of the college should center upon state 
problems. This principle may be suffi- 
ciently illustrated in the development of 
state-wide "campaigns." 

Let us say that in Nebraska the great un- 
dertaking at a given time is the improve- 
ment of the beef cattle. The introduction 
of better breeding stock and the teaching of 
better methods of handling will be taken up 
by all agencies of every sort — state board of 
agriculture, boards of trade, granges, 
schools, neighborhood clubs, county agen- 
cies and agricultural college; but upon the 
208 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

extension service of the college may prop- 
erly fall the organization and direction of 
the general campaign, including the corre- 
lation of all co-operating members. 

There are dozens of movements in rural 
betterment which can be easily set forward 
through such campaigns. Suggestive ex- 
amples are spraying campaigns, poultry 
campaigns, seed corn improvement, horse- 
breeding campaigns, better school grounds, 
better farmyards, better kitchens. 

In this list I would specifically include 
selling campaigns. One extension organi- 
zation within my knowledge has done val- 
iant service in assisting farmers to dispose 
of their apple crop ; and there have no doubt 
been other undertakings along similar lines. 
Inasmuch as the selling end of the farming 
business is the one most needing help this 
is clearly the place to take hold. The real 
business of the college is to help the farmer, 
and as this purpose is expressed more 
directly through the extension service than 
through any other branch, no one should 
hesitate on the propriety of breaking in at 
this point. 

209 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

REVIEW 

This chapter does not discuss the adminis- 
trative organization of extension work nor 
its general relations to other branches of 
the college enterprise, but does endeavor to 
outline the extension service as a form of 
teaching. As a specialized form of teach- 
ing, it is governed by the common principles 
of pedagogy; but the applications of these 
principles are at some points rather novel. 

1. Important readjustments have been 
necessitated within the college to fit the 
newly organized extension service into its 
effective place. Other large readjustments 
have been made necessary by the organiza- 
tion of the county farm bureaus. These cor- 
relations have not yet been completed. 

2. As in all other forms of teaching, ex- 
tension instruction depends largely on the 
teacher. Character and personality count 
above all else, but sound training is highly 
desirable. Some specialized school should 
soon appear for the training of extension 
workers. 

3. The futility of mere talk is widely 

210 



EXTENSION TEACHING 

demonstrated. It is sound extension policy 
to minimize the giving of lectures in favor 
of other teaching methods. 

4. Demonstrations have largely sup- 
planted lectures in the extension field, but 
demonstrations, as heretofore conducted, 
hardly constitute a final form of teaching. 
Moreover, many lines of demonstration be- 
gun by the colleges should nov^ be turned 
over to the county bureaus. 

5. Boys' and girls' clubs are especially ef- 
fective. A large part of this work can be 
advantageously turned over to the county 
agencies, but the state extension service can 
be of material assistance in co-operation 
with the local organizations. 

6. Movable schools, lasting a week or 
two weeks in each locality, are known to be 
worth while. Though this kind of teaching 
should be practiced with discretion and not 
too greatly expanded in any state, it may be 
looked upon as one of the permanent forms 
of extension teaching. 

7. Correspondence courses are distinctly 
successful. They should be extended and 
widely improved. 

211 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

8. Publications of various sorts are ef- 
fective in carrying instruction to thousands 
of persons. Extension publications gener- 
ally need much more careful study and edit- 
ing, and in general the whole college policy 
needs a careful restudy to determine what 
materials should be published and what 
forms the publication can best assume. 

9. Many lines of work formerly politely 
known as experimental and conducted by 
the experiment stations should be trans- 
ferred to the extension service. Variety 
testing ofifers a good example. 

10. Agricultural surveys and statistical 
studies of many sorts are to be made by va- 
rious agencies. While the extension service 
has no claim to a monopoly of this field, it 
should, for the present, undertake a consid- 
erable part. 

1 1. State-wide campaigns of various sorts 
offer another line of highly useful endeavor 
to the state extension services. 



212 



CHAPTER X 
THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

EXPERIMENTATION loomed large 
in all the early projects for the agricul- 
tural colleges. Experiments of one kind 
and another were made from the very be- 
ginning. With the passage of the Hatch 
Act in 1887 the experiment stations became 
an integral and important feature in every 
agricultural college. 

The experiment stations have been popu- 
lar institutions, sometimes quite overshad- 
owing in their public appeal the colleges to 
which they are attached. It is not too much 
to say that up to the present time they have 
done more than any other one feature of the 
college work to commend these colleges to 
the general public. 

With the recent general establishment of 
an extension service in each agricultural col- 
lege there seems to be some danger that the 
experiment stations shall be forgotten or 
213 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

neglected. Up to the present time the ex- 
periment stations have unquestionably done 
a considerable amount of extension work. 
They have sent out many publications of a 
purely popular character. From the nature 
of the case the extension service comes 
nearer to the public; and if this service takes 
over all the popular features of the experi- 
ment station w^ork it would seem possible 
that the experiment station may sufifer a 
popular neglect, especially by those v^ho 
pass laws and grant appropriations. Such 
a result would be unfortuate and in the end 
disastrous. The progress of agriculture de- 
pends primarily upon the discovery of new 
facts and principles, and unless the research 
agencies continue to make such discoveries 
progress must cease. In this proper sense 
the experiment station is the most funda- 
mental agency connected with the whole ag- 
ricultural enterprise. 

For several reasons the experiment station 
problems, including organization, finance 
and general policy, have been better studied 
than similar problems in connection with 
the general work of the agricultural col- 
214 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

leges. This fact makes it unnecessary at 
this time to go into a detailed discussion of 
all such matters. Certain outstanding 
features of the experiment station problem, 
however, should be considered in reference 
to the general problems of the whole agri- 
cultural college undertaking. 

FUNDS AND THEIR USE 

Nearly all the agricultural experiment 
stations derive their chief support from fed- 
eral and state funds. The federal appro- 
priations are received under the provisions 
of the Hatch Act of 1887 and the Adams 
Act of 1906. Each one of these bills pro- 
vides $15,000 annually for each state experi- 
ment station. Besides this nearly all sta- 
tions receive more or less liberal grants from 
their own state legislatures. Some other 
sources of revenue, usually of a minor na- 
ture, are open to certain stations. 

In the past very considerable efforts have 

been necessary in certain states to prevent 

the misapplication of experiment station 

funds to other purposes. The most general 

215 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

difficulties lay in the insidious and wide- 
spread diversion of these funds to the sup- 
port of purely college enterprises. It was no 
uncommon discovery to find a man drawing 
two-thirds of his salary from experiment 
station funds while giving three-quarters of 
his time to college teaching. There were 
sometimes still more glaring instances of 
malfeasance. For the most part these diffi- 
culties have disappeared or are being rap- 
idly mitigated. However, the problem in 
one form or another seems likely always to 
persist. It will be necessary always to take 
special care that the funds appropriated for 
research and experimental work shall be 
used for these purposes strictly and for no 
other. 

MEN FOR STATION WORK 

The difficulties just referred to have Had 
their most manifest exemplification In the 
personnel of the experiment station staff. 
Most men in agricultural college depart- 
ments were chosen primarily for their sup- 
posed ability as teachers, little consideration 
216 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

being given to their aptitude for research 
work. Such men, with the constant pressure 
of teaching duties ever upon them, and with 
a natural preference for teaching, have 
given very little and very poor attention to 
the secondary work of research. It had 
long been clear that to get first-class results 
in the research field it is necessary to have 
men of special aptitude, especially trained 
for this undertaking. 

As a practical proposition this has meant 
that thoroughly satisfactory results in the 
research field could be secured only by men 
devoted exclusively to that work. In other 
words, it is necessary to make a somewhat 
complete separation between the experi- 
ment station staff and the college teaching 
staff. This point has been pressed strongly 
by the experiment station directors and or- 
ganizers for some years past, but the oppor- 
tunity for making such a separation has been 
notably widened by the appearance of the 
extension service as a separate organization. 
The presence now in all these colleges of 
three separate kinds of work, viz., college 
teaching, experiment station work, and ex- 
217 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

tension work, makes it much easier to divide 
up the duties of each particular man in a 
manner best suited to his personal ability. 

Doubtless the practice should prevail 
quite generally of reserving experiment sta- 
tion men, especially those devoted to funda- 
mental research, to experiment station duties 
exclusively. On the other hand, an occa- 
sional lecture trip into the field will help to 
vitalize the research man's knowledge and 
to give him a wider outlook. Furthermore, 
it is not incompatible with the principle here 
laid down, for the research man to conduct 
the work of a select group of graduate stu- 
dents. Indeed, a research man, surrounded 
by a few enthusiastic graduate assistants, 
makes one of the best units for research work 
and at the same time one of the best organi- 
zations for the prosecution of real graduate 
study which can be imagined. But, for a 
research man to undertake any general 
teaching of freshman or sophomore classes 
is certainly a bad form of organization. 

We have said that for the research work 
we require a man whose training and apti- 
tudes are different from those of the teacher. 
218 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

While the teacher requires personal mag- 
netism and all warm human qualities, these 
are an almost negligible factor in the re- 
search man. On the other hand, the experi- 
mentalist should have the most thorough 
fundamental training. Such training should 
be both broad and deep. The difficulty of 
getting men sufficiently well trained for the 
exacting work of research is widely recog- 
nized throughout the country. As a general 
principle, subject to only minor exceptions, 
the training of the research man falls mainly 
in the field of science. Not only should 
science be emphasized in his training, but 
pure science should predominate. Pure 
physics is more important than agricultural 
physics, pure chemistry much more im- 
portant than the chemistry of fertilizers. It 
follows that practical training in agricul- 
ture, animal husbandry and horticulture are 
still less important. 

It is pointed out elsewhere in this book 
that the field of college teaching, and espe- 
cially of extension work, should be turned 
over to the technical man ; that is, to pomol- 
ogists, market gardeners, dairymen and live 
219 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

Stock Specialists. On the other hand, the 
field of research belongs primarily to the 
scientist. Even when the problems in hand 
have the most direct bearing upon crop pro- 
duction or animal husbandry the purely 
scientific approach is most likely to yield 
results in the way of new discoveries. Real 
discovery is most likely to come from a thor- 
ough consideration of fundamental prin- 
ciples; that is, from a study of the underly- 
ing science. 

PROBLEMS AND POLICIES 

There is a general feeling that the work 
of the experiment stations may be divided 
broadly into two somewhat different areas, 
which may be denominated research and ex- 
periment. Perhaps we may call research a 
more thoroughgoing and fundamental form 
of experiment. Research work, properly 
speaking, is almost exclusively scientific. It 
belongs in the realm of physics, chemistry 
and biology. 

On the other hand, experiment is under- 
stood to be of a more practical character and 

220 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

to lie nearer to the field of general agricul- 
ture and horticulture. It deals with the 
more direct applications of scientific prin- 
ciples in these practical fields. It follows 
almost necessarily that, while research be- 
longs to the field of science, practical experi- 
mentation belongs more naturally to the 
technical departments of poultry husbandry, 
dairy husbandry, animal husbandry, pomol- 
ogy, floriculture, etc. 

Good experiment station men have been 
placing considerable emphasis upon the 
principle that research work should be more 
fundamental than it has been in this coun- 
try. It would seem desirable to get down 
more nearly to bedrock principles. There 
should be more work in the basic lines of 
pure science. Unquestionably this idea 
ought to be distinctly emphasized in experi- 
ment station policy. Moreover, this idea 
properly enforced makes it possible to draw 
a distinction badly overlooked up to the 
present time. In almost every institution 
there has been more or less disturbance over 
the duplication of work in several different 
departments. One department overlaps 
221! 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

upon another. The most serious difficulties 
have arisen because the science departments 
have constantly endeavored to enter the field 
of practical applications on the one hand, 
while on the other hand the technical 
departments have constantly undertaken 
purely scientific investigations. It is plain 
that the proper separation of the work could 
be secured by confining the science investi- 
gations to fundamental principles, and by 
confining the experimental work of the tech- 
nical department to the technical applica- 
tions. This would place the research work 
practically exclusively in the hands of the 
science departments and the technical ex- 
perimentation with equal exclusiveness in 
the hands of the technical departments. 
Everything is to be gained by making such 
a change. It makes the work more efifective 
in both directions, and, at the same time, 
offers a principle of division, fair to all, and 
capable of clearing the deck of all diffi- 
culties. 

This distinction between the scientific and 
the technical lines of work is easy enough, 
as far as it goes. We ought to make room, 

222 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

however, for another kind of research work 
which as yet has hardly appeared above the 
horizon. Problems in agricultural eco- 
nomics and even in rural sociology are be- 
ginning to come into view, and it is plain 
that some of them are of great significance 
for the future of agriculture. While these 
problems for the most part have not yet 
been sufficiently defined nor the means of 
approach to them sufficiently tested to make 
the installation of experimental work prac- 
ticable, it is nevertheless perfectly certain 
that far-reaching investigations in these 
fields must presently be made. Perhaps we 
may guess that the investigations in eco- 
nomics will have a definitely scientific char- 
acter and will follow the methods developed 
by the research scientists; while, on the 
other hand, the studies in rural sociology 
will be more practical in their nature and 
more closely allied in purposes and results 
with the practical experiments of the pres- 
ent technical departments. 

It is a matter of general observation that 
most experiment stations have endeavored 
to cover too much territory. They have 
223 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

tried to conduct experiments in every pos- 
sible field of agriculture and science. In 
some instances this has been due to outside 
pressure; in other instances it has been due 
to the competition of departments within the 
institution. Whatever the cause, the effect 
is weakening, sometimes disastrous. 

Everyone who thinks about these prob- 
lems now understands that the best results 
are to be secured only when the experiment 
station confines its efforts to a limited num- 
ber of important problems. These problems 
should be chosen with great care, of course, 
but they should be adhered to strictly 
through a long series of years and with the 
utmost devotion. When any experiment 
station is prepared in this way to cut down 
its program from the widest range of possi- 
bilities to the narrowest range of efficiency 
the first consideration must naturally be the 
needs of its own particular field. The agri- 
cultural industries of the state must be 
served first of all. The problems to be em- 
phasized must be those which are of prime 
importance to the state. 

For some time, however, there has been 
224 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

a feeling that neighboring states with sim- 
ilar agricultural problems should practice 
some definite form of co-operation in this 
division of the agricultural field. Any 
fundamental discoveries made in Nebraska 
and applicable to the growing of corn or 
wheat are equally available in the state of 
Iowa. Any experiments in poultry culture 
which give valuable results for Iowa will 
be equally useful in Nebraska. It is en- 
tirely unnecessary, therefore, for both 
Nebraska and Iowa to maintain duplicate 
departments in both these fields. While 
this principle of co-operation is widely rec- 
ognized and has been talked about a good 
deal, very little has actually been accom- 
plished in this direction. 

After all other considerations have had 
their hearing it must be remembered that 
the type of work to be done in any particular 
experiment station is dependent to a large 
degree upon the men available. If a certain 
organization has a certain man capable of 
doing a certain kind of work, this is one of 
the strongest possible reasons for entering 
that field. On the other hand, if it is impos- 
225 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

sible to secure a man who will enter with 
ability and enthusiasm upon a proposed line 
of work, this is the best possible reason in 
the world for letting that problem alone. 
As in all forms of organization the personal, 
human element must be more carefully re- 
garded. 

ORGANIZATION 

The departmental type of organization 
which has developed so extensively in our 
agricultural colleges has generally run 
through the experiment station also. While 
this form of organization is highly artificial 
and subject to a number of shortcomings 
everywhere, it is particularly useless in its 
experiment station application. It is a fair 
question whether an experiment station ever 
ought to be organized into departments in 
the commonly accepted form. When an or- 
ganization feels it necessary to conduct ex- 
periments in chemistry, entomology, horti- 
culture, dairying, etc., it certainly is on the 
wrong track. The more appropriate pro- 
cedure is to determine what problems are to 
be solved and then to bring to bear upon 
226 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

these problems every agency which can best 
reach the desired results. If chemistry can 
contribute something, then a chemist should 
work upon the problem. If physics can 
contribute something, then the physicist 
should be called in. But the line of ap- 
proach should be from the problem to the 
department and never from the department 
to the problem, as is now the almost uni- 
versal custom. To carry out these principles 
logically we should organize our experi- 
mental work upon a few definite problems. 
We should then bring to bear upon these 
problems all the separate agencies at our 
command. Approaching our work in this 
direction we should secure a much better 
co-operation between different investigators 
than we now secure between different de- 
partments. Indeed, the lack of co-operation 
between departments is one of the best 
known internal diseases of our present or- 
ganization. 

PUBLICATIONS 

When the original Hatch Act provided 
for the publication of at least four bulletins 
227 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

each year by each experiment station it 
turned loose upon the country a flood of lit- 
erature which can probably never be 
stopped, perhaps not even checked. On the 
whole those publications have been very 
valuable in the progress of agriculture. 
Nevertheless, everyone realizes that many 
of them have been useless, many more of 
them have been poor, and only a few of 
them have been of really high merit. Every- 
one feels that this indiscriminate publica- 
tion should be in some way regulated. This 
regulation should accomplish at least two 
things; first, to reduce the quantity, and sec- 
ond, to Improve the quality. Some experi- 
ment stations and some colleges have estab- 
lished definite editorships for the super- 
vision of their publications, but on the whole 
this method has not yet accomplished such 
conspicuous improvement as to commend 
it for general adoption. No doubt some 
form of editorship will be necessary to ac- 
complish this desirable result, but obviously 
it must be organized in a stronger form than 
has usually been given to it and must be 
based upon some body of principles more 
228 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

carefully ascertained and more definitely 
stated. 

Attention has already been called to the 
fact that the extension service has taken over 
from the experiment station a certain num- 
ber of its functions. One of the most con- 
spicuous of these is the publication of popu- 
lar bulletins. There has always been a 
question in the past just how far the experi- 
ment station ought to go in this direction. 
Various specious arguments have been 
brought forward to justify the stations in 
the publication of popular bulletins which 
have little or no connection with the re- 
search work being carried on. It is quite 
clear that all these popular publications 
should now be transferred to the extension 
service, and that the bulletins of the experi- 
ment station should be confined strictly to 
the publication of results actually secured 
in experiments carried on by the station it- 
self. If the work of the station is confined, 
as it should be, more and more to purely 
scientific research, then its publications will 
tend to take on more and more of a purely 
scientific character. If it should occur that 

229 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

the publications of a certain station should 
be very rarely read by the practical farmers, 
such a condition would be evidence that this 
particular station was giving its territory 
the best possible service. The prime busi- 
ness of the experiment station is research, not 
publication — certainly not popular publica- 
tion. Looking at the output of the experi- 
ment station in this way as a body of scien- 
tific discovery, it would mean that much of 
the results could be published in the scien- 
tific journals and other channels, rather than 
in the conventional bulletin of the experi- 
ment station. 

SUMMARY 

This chapter does not purport to cover ex- 
haustively all phases of experiment station 
work, organization and policy, but certain 
questions which are of direct interest to the 
agricultural college and to the general pub- 
lic are taken up as follows: 

I. The position of the experiment station 
has changed materially with the develop- 
ment of an independent extension service. 
230 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

There is danger in some states that the sta- 
tion will be neglected. 

2. The experiment station has certain 
funds appropriated for certain specific pur- 
poses. Experience shows that these funds 
have to be guarded with unremitting jeal- 
ousy. Certain abuses, once common, are be- 
ing extirpated, but the necessity for vigilant 
administration of station funds will not soon 
disappear. 

3. Men for station work should be 
broadly educated, yet deeply experienced 
in some specialty. They must be patient, 
reliable investigators, rather than popular, 
attractive expositors. 

4. Men of scientific bent and training are 
to be preferred for research work, and re- 
search work should be emphasized. On the 
other hand, purely practical experiments, 
Involving the direct application of scientific 
data to field conditions, should be conducted 
by men of technical, nonsclentlfic training 
and connections. 

5. There should thus be established a 
practical line of separation between research 
in science and experiments In the practical 

231 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

applications of science. These two lines 
ought to diverge radically. Research ought 
to be increasingly more scientific and ab- 
stract, while practical experimentation 
ought not to compete with the sciences in 
the search for basic principles. 

6. Research in the field of agricultural 
^economics should be organized. Rural soci- 
ology also offers a field for study, though it 
is difficult as yet to determine the scope and 
character of these investigations. 

7. Concentration upon fewer problems is 
the best policy in most station work. 

8. Problems to be emphasized are those 
of the local agricultural industry. There 
should be agreement between neighboring 
states to prevent duplication of work. Be- 
yond this the decision as to what lines a par- 
ticular station will or will not follow should 
properly depend considerably upon the men 
available for the work. 

9. The usual departmental type of or- 
ganization is of doubtful utility in the ex- 
periment station. In general it would seem 
better to organize the research work around 
certain definite problems. 

232 



THE EXPERIMENT STATION 

lo. Careful study ought to be made of 
station publications with a view to reducing 
their quantity and improving their quality. 
The issue of purely popular bulletins ought 
to be transferred without delay to the exten- 
sion branch of the college service. 



233 



CHAPTER XI 

SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND 
METHODS 

AGRICULTURAL college work de- 
velops certain problems not found in 
the general colleges. As a rule these special 
problems have been too little considered. 
The agricultural colleges have been too 
ready to accept the traditions and practices 
of their classical forerunners, even when 
those practices have been quite unsuited to 
the work in hand. Conservatism has held 
alliance with other powerful forces to keep 
the agricultural schools to the beaten path. 
Some of the outstanding problems of this 
special nature are now to be discussed. 

FARM EXPERIENCE 

In quite recent times the number of city- 
bred boys coming to the agricultural col- 
leges has notably increased. Several col- 

234 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

leges report over one-half their students 
from the cities. It is plain enough that 
these boys have a very different standing in 
the agricultural courses from those other 
boys who from their early years have hunted 
hen's nests, harnessed the horses, fed the 
pigs, picked apples, hoed the potatoes and 
milked the cows. The advantages of this 
early farm training are incalculable for all 
purposes of education, but as a preparation 
for college courses in animal husbandry, 
dairying or crop production they are well- 
nigh indispensable. 

The problem of how to teach these sub- 
jects to boys who do not know guinea hens 
from geese with the feathers on is plainly a 
serious one. The practical difficulty is 
greater when classes are made up of half 
farm boys and half city boys. 

With the present tendency toward much 
more technical work in the college courses, 
the necessity for practical farm experience 
becomes more acute. It seems ridiculous to 
send out a graduate of a professional agri- 
cultural course who cannot harness and 
hitch up a horse or run a mowing machine. 

23s 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

Many agricultural educators, by no means 
radical in their ideas, have come to think 
that such men should be denied their college 
degrees in agriculture, at least until their 
deficiencies are to some extent repaired. 

If this position is taken the question im- 
mediately arises, how are these city boys to 
get their farm experience? Shall the col- 
lege attempt to supply the deficiency? Shall 
the college farm be opened to courses of a 
purely practical and experiential character? 
Or shall the college require its students to 
get the experience elsewhere? 

In theory the simplest and best way is to 
require a minimum of farm experience for 
college entrance. Students who come to the 
college from the cities may reasonably be 
entered with liberal arrangements for mak- 
ing up any conditions of this kind. 

A special committee of the Association of 
American Agricultural Colleges and Ex- 
periment Stations has recently considered 
this matter carefully and made the follow- 
ing specific recommendations: 

"Every student enrolling in the four-year 
agricultural course should be given some 
236 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

sort of examination to determine the extent 
of his knowledge of farm operations. 

*'If it is unwise or impracticable to ex- 
clude such students as fail in this examina- 
tion until they shall have gained farm ex- 
perience, the colleges must eventually: 
assume the responsibility by providing 
means for giving them such experience, 
either on farms owned by the colleges or on 
private farms. 

"Farm practice of a general nature should 
be acquired early in the college course, in 
order to prepare the students for practice in 
special branches of agriculture in the later 
years. 

"It will doubtless be impracticable for the 
agricultural colleges to provide any consid- 
erable number of students with training in 
the manual arts of the farm by employing 
them on the college or station farms. 

"Colleges having a number of demonstra- 
tion farms may be able to train a few stu- 
dents in farm practice on these and the col- 
lege farms. 

"But neither college farms nor demon- 
stration farms are operated under normal 

237 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

conditions. It will be better, therefore, for 
the colleges to send inexperienced students 
out to selected private farms for practical 
experience, 

"Great care should be exercised in the 
selection of these farms. As near as pos- 
sible they should meet the following con- 
ditions: 

" ( I ) They should be relatively small 
general farms, in order that the stu- 
dents may get a variety of work and 
experience. 

"(2) They should be well equipped 
and well managed. 

'^(3) They should be in charge of 
men who are friendly to students, ca- 
pable and willing to teach them, and 
possessed of good judgment as to the 
wages earned by the students. 
''The college should neither encourage 
nor permit inexperienced students whom 
they place on farms to hire at high wages. 
Disappointment and dissatisfaction are al- 
most sure to result from such arrangement. 
It would be better for each student to hire 
out for board, work clothes, and whatever 

238 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

else the farmer thinks his services are worth. 

"Each student should be required to bring 
from his employer a certificate of merit as 
a farm laborer before being credited with 
passing his farm practice condition. He 
should also make a report on his own obser- 
vations and experiences and on the business 
management of the farm on which he has 
worked. Forms for the certificate of merit 
and for the student reports should be fur- 
nished by the college. 

"For farm-reared students and advanced 
students specializing in some branch of agri- 
culture, lists should be made of dairy farm- 
ers, stock farmers, fruit farmers, truck farm- 
ers, poultry farmers, and the like, who are 
willing to employ advanced students and 
capable of instructing them, and students 
working on these farms should likewise be 
required to bring back certificates of merit, 
and personal reports. 

"The practice now followed in many in- 
stitutions of arranging for groups of stu- 
dents to supplement their practical expe- 
rience by visiting successfully managed 
farms is to be highly commended. Farm 

239 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

observation trips can be made of great value, 
not only to students who have begun to 
specialize, but also to those in the more gen- 
eral courses in agriculture. 

"All farms to which students are sent for 
training or observation should be open at 
all times to visitation and inspection by 
members of the agricultural faculty, and in 
return the owners or managers of them 
should receive from the colleges special 
consideration in the way of advice and as- 
sistance. 

"In brief, farm practice should be digni- 
fied as an essential factor in the education of 
young men for agricultural pursuits, and 
the agencies employed by the colleges for 
providing such practice should be as free 
from unfavorable criticism as it Is possible 
to make them." 

However, this does not represent all that 
the college can do or should do. For one 
thing, most colleges can undertake organ- 
ized efforts to find suitable summer work on 
farms for boys needing the experience. En- 
gagements of longer duration, much more 
valuable, can be arranged for a certain num- 
240 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

ber, and this number should be increased to 
the maximum. Wherever these inexpe- 
rienced students cannot be effectively 
farmed out in this manner the college ought 
itself to undertake their training. Much 
can be done in field camps, either on college 
farms or on private farms made available 
for such uses through special arrangement. 
The college cannot afford to spare any effort 
to give its students a good grounding in 
practical farm affairs. 

Question has been raised v^hether such 
farm experience should count for college 
credit. This is a local question, to be de- 
cided in the light of customs and conditions 
in each institution. It is really not of radi- 
cal importance. 

FIELD CAMPS 

The use of field camps for instruction in 
professional lines is not by any means a new 
idea. It has been used with notable success 
for years by the engineering schools, by the 
mining schools and by the forestry schools. 
To a very limited extent it has been tried in 
agricultural teaching, apparently always 
241 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

with much satisfaction. The idea is so pe- 
culiarly suited to the requirements of agri- 
cultural teaching that it is a great wonder it 
has not long ago become the universal 
practice. 

Doubtless the simplest way to introduce 
this method begins with senior students 
majoring in some technical subject, as 
pomology, or animal industry. For them 
the camp can be established in some notable 
fruit district or on some first-class stock 
farm. In such a camp the instructors and 
students can live together with their work, 
creating an atmosphere congenial to their 
subject and in every way stimulating to the 
men. 

So little has yet been done in this line, 
however, that detailed directions for the 
management of this type of instruction can- 
not be given. They remain to be worked out 
by the ambitious and fortunate teachers to 
whom this opportunity may come. 

FIELD EXCURSIONS 

Trips afield, varying in length from an 
hour to a week, have long been a feature of 
242 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

agricultural college teaching. Their popu- 
larity proves that they have value. Yet any- 
one who knows this work from the inside 
must realize that much of it is highly inef- 
ficient. Every student is bound to see some- 
thing instructive, no matter how poor the 
itinerary nor how wild the junket. But if the 
teacher makes proper plans in advance and 
applies proper drills afterward these trips 
can be made highly efifective. 

In practically every case a trip should be 
outlined on paper and a copy of the outline 
given to each student at the start. This pro- 
gram specifies the places to be visited and 
the items to be seen. If possible there 
should be outlined particular problems for 
investigation, the answers to which can be 
secured only by the personal initiative and 
sustained efifort of the individual student. 
The instructor can point out this or that im- 
portant matter, but the student who looks 
up something for himself is much better off. 

The following outline, prepared by Prof. 
A. H. Nehrling for a two days' trip of senior 
students visiting commercial ranges of 
greenhouses producing chiefly cut flowers, 

243 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

is a good example of what this form of in- 
struction ought to be. 

OBSERVATION TRIP TO CROMWELL, CONN. 

Make a survey of the range and boiler plant 

of A. N. Pierson, Cromwell, Conn. 
Note the following points: 

1. Layout. 

a. Location of the lower plant as regards 

soil conditions and points of compass. 

b. Location of the upper plant as regards 

same characters. 

2. Storage. 

a. Method of cooling. 

b. Flowers in storage. 

3. Shipping department. 

a. Packing, materials used. 

b. Markets. 

4. Houses. 

a. Notice difference in construction of 

modern houses and those of older 
type. 

b. Sizes of some of newer houses. 

5. Crops. 

a. What crops are grown? 
244 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

b. Varieties of the more important crops. 

c. General methods used. 

6. Manure system. 

a. Source of manure. 

b. Method of preparing. 

c. Method of distributing. 

7. Boiler plant. 

a. Number of boilers, size and kind. 

b. Amount of coal consumed. 

8. Construction and repair department. 

a. Comment upon the feasibility of hav- 
ing this department. 

b.^Note the character of work done. 

A written report of this trip will be re- 
quired on a specified date. 

Very soon after the return from a field 
trip some thorough test ought to be given. 
This should usually be preceded by a verbal 
discussion. The test may come in the form 
of a written report or of a written classroom 
examination based on questions from the in- 
structor. But the subsequent examination, 
like the precedent outline, is essential in 
order to fix in the student's mind the knowl- 
edge developed by the trip. 

245 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 
FIELD LABORATORY WORK 

All sorts of experiments have been made 
in providing laboratory work in agricul- 
tural subjects. As a rule teachers have been 
too much influenced by the really fine labo- 
ratory courses which they have known in 
botany, chemistry or zoology. The labora- 
tory idea has been for them essentially sed- 
entary. Also it has depended on elaborate 
equipments of microscopes, test tubes and 
reagents. 

If we look over any strong agricultural 
college, however, for the really successful 
laboratory courses in technical lines we shall 
discover them to be of a very different char- 
acter. The object of a laboratory exercise 
is to bring the student into stimulating con- 
tact with certain materials and processes. 
But the materials and processes of floricul- 
ture, for instance, are very different from 
those of chemistry. The ingenuity of the 
instructor should be directed to finding the 
most immediate contacts with flowers, and 
plants and with processes of growth and 
methods of handling, not to the discovery of 
246 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

some machinery which may be interposed 
between the student and these materials. 

As in the management of field trips the 
field laboratory exercise may be made much 
more effective by the use of carefully pre- 
pared written syllabi. As far aspossiblethese 
outlines should set definite questions, the an- 
swers to which can be found by the work of 
an intelligent student. An excellent ex- 
ample of this sort of outline used by Prof. 
F. C. Sears in his work with juniors in prac- 
tical pomology is given here. This exercise 
is designed for field use in the study of or- 
chard cover crops. 

SECTION L CROPS 

Note under each different cover crop. 

a. Roots. 

1. Depth to which they go. 

2. Amount of growth — are roots few and 

scattering, or fibrous and plentiful. 

3. Nodules — number and size. 

b. Tops — amount of growth; height of 

stalks, number of branches and leaves. 
247 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

1. Cowpeas. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

2. Soy beans. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

3. Summer vetch. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

4. Winter vetch 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

c. Compare especially with summer 

vetch. 

5. Buckwheat. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

6. Dwarf rape. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

7. Cow-horn turnips. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

8. Purple-top turnips. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

248 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

9. Common red clover. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

10. Mammoth red clover. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

11. Crimson clover. 

a. Roots. 

b. Tops. 

SECTION II. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS 

1. Note effect on physical condition of 

soil. 

2. Note value as a "soil binder." 

3. Note value for holding snow. 

The instruction in the various specialized 
branches of modern agriculture is so very 
new that no system of laboratory exercises 
has been worked out to a finality anywhere. 
It is a field in which each instructor must 
use his own ingenuity, and must use it stren- 
uously. Only the hardest kind of study on 
the part of a clever teacher will produce a 
thoroughly good course of laboratory ex- 
ercises. 

249 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 
JUDGING WORK 

During the last ten years the practice of 
grain, fruit and stock judging has assumed a 
very large place in all agricultural colleges, 
agricultural high schools and boys' clubs. 
The work is obviously effective and will 
doubtless long remain a feature of agricul- 
tural instruction. Yet probably it ought to 
be reorganized on a better pedagogic basis. 
The fact that the same judging exercises 
are given to college seniors, to high school 
pupils and to club boys in the eighth grade 
at least suggests that a careful adjustment 
has not yet been reached. 

Judging work is particularly effective for 
several perfectly plain reasons. It rests upon 
observation; it intensifies and directs obser- 
vation. It also promotes and directs analy- 
sis. Best of all, it requires the exercise of 
judgment. For what is stock judging except 
the exercise of judgment, of critical, per- 
sonal judgment? And a keen, quick, ac- 
curate judgment lies at the very basis of 
success in all practical affairs, pre-eminently 
in agriculture. In mathematical science one 
250 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

reasons and comes to exact conclusions based 
on infallible premises; but in handling 
fruits or grains or live stock one judges and 
reaches conclusions more or less reliable 
from premises often dubious and uncertain. 
Thoughtless persons sometimes sneer at this 
sort of mental exercise, and call it a guess- 
ing school ; yet most afifairs of life, and espe- 
cially the great affairs, are directed, not by 
exact knowledge, but by sound judgment 
acting on conflicting data. 

The universality of this judging faculty 
and the necessity of its constant training jus- 
tify in a measure the anomalous practice of 
teaching by this method throughout the 
boy's school career, from eighth grade in the 
grammar school to senior year in college. 
It may be suggested, however, that in the 
later years much more critical work may be 
required. But the work ought to change not 
merely in quality — new elements ought to 
be added. The advanced student should not 
be content to compare two samples and say 
which is better; he ought to begin to form 
distinct concepts of type. He ought to know 
the leading types, breeds or varieties and 
251 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

know them effectively, so that these general 
concepts become the standards by which 
single samples are promptly valued. 

When types, breeds and varieties begin to 
be recognized there come in problems of 
pedigree or of nomenclature and of classi- 
fication. Here opens the»door of taxanomic 
science, one of the noblest fields of all 
science, and one of the fields on which gen- 
eral natural science meets freely with tech- 
nical agricultural science. In this field there 
is unlimited room for study up to the meas- 
ure of the best seniors in college. There is 
indeed material here in plenty for the stu- 
dents in the graduate schools. 

THE SUMMER VACATION 

Men In other lines of business have never 
been able to understand why teachers and 
students in college should have three 
months' vacation every summer. The com- 
mon practice really does require some la- 
bored explanation. It is a fact that the 
teacher can often use this period most 
profitably for himself and in the interest of 
252 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

his work. It is not so clear that the vaca- 
tion is an advantage to the average student. 
A few men do earn money (usually a bare 
trifle) by peddling books, waiting on table 
in a summer hotel or playing on a ball team. 
A still smaller number find employment 
where the experience is of material profes- 
sional advantage to them. The majority 
would be much better off in school, and all 
the more so if their summer's application 
should serve to shorten the days to gradua- 
tion. Three months of time after gradua- 
tion would have three times or ten times the 
practical value to the young man of three 
months detached time in a summer vacation. 
In an agricultural college, however, the 
objections to the waste of the summer vaca- 
tion time grow to enormous proportions and 
take on a totally different character. For 
the technical work in agriculture and horti- 
culture the summer season is indispensable. 
The customary three-months break not only 
wastes the best weeks of the year, but largely 
nullifies the field work of the spring and 
fall. The utter absurdity of this old custom 
is now being widely recognized, and we 

253 



THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 

may hope that no progressive agricultural 
college will much longer waste the precious 
summer months. 

SUMMARY 

A few of the special problems peculiar to 
the agricultural colleges are discussed in 
this chapter. 

1. Farm experience is very desirabl& for 
agricultural college students. If possible, it 
should be secured before entering college, 
and the colleges are justified in making such 
experience a requirement for matricula- 
tion. However, unless all students lacking 
such practical experience are strictly ex- 
cluded, the college should make serious ef- 
fort to supply the deficiency before gradu- 
ation. 

2. Field camps should be established and 
freely used in teaching various branches of 
agriculture and horticulture, even of domes- 
tic science. 

3. Field excursions have always been 
popular. They need to be better organized 
to make them reasonably effective in teach- 
ing. 

254 



SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS 

4. Regular laboratory instruction in the 
field also requires a stricter discipline and a 
more careful preparation than has usually 
been offered. This kind of work can be 
made very effective, but it is often a pure 
waste of time. 

5. Judging work, such as corn judging, 
stock judging, etc., has come to occupy a 
peculiar position in modern agricultural 
teaching. It ought to be given by prefer- 
ence in the high school and in the earlier 
years of the college course, but in special 
cases and with special adaptations may be 
offered at any time. 

6. The summer vacation is an anomaly 
and an absurdity in an agricultural college, 
and should be immediately, eternally and 
universally abandoned. 



255 



INDEX 

PAGB 

Agricultural culture 6 

Agricultural material Ii8 

Agriculture, subdivision 94 

Agricultural subjects l6o 

Agricultural teaching 127 

Appropriations 47 

Boys' and Girls' clubs I97 

Buildings 54 

Campaigns 208 

Campus plan 57 

Centralizing tendency 37 

Citizenship I53 

College or university? 14 

College president 21 

Consolidation of colleges 15 

Constructive design 164 

Co-operation between states 225 

Cornell plan, the 35 

Correlation of vi^ork 29 

Correspondence courses 200 

County agencies 190 

Course of study 107 

Course of study, arrangement 148 

Course of study, materials 116 

Course of study, outlined 167-172 

Culture and the teacher lO 

Cultural training 5 

257 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Decentralization 39 

Degrees 76 

Demonstration projects 195 

Department buildings 59 

Department organization 27 

Domestic science 103 

Dormitories 58 

Economics 143 

English ^ 139-152 

Entrance requirements 78 

Equipment 61 

Errors in building 57 

Excursions 242 

Extension teaching 86-212 

Experiment station, the 213 

Faculty, the 24 

Farmers' institutes , 198 

Farm experience 234 

Field camps 241 

Field instruction 246 

Financial policy 47 

Financial problems 46 

Four-year course 77 

Funds for experiment 215 

Genetics loi 

Graduate school, the 73 

Ground plan 57 

Handicraft courses 162 

Horticulture, subdivision 96 

Human element, the 185 

"Humanities, the" 138-153 

258 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Ideals I 

Illinois plan, the 30 

Instruction, organization of 7^ 

Itinerant schools 198 

Judging 250 

Laboratory method 180 

Land problems 49 

Landscape gardening 98 

Lectures i77 

Massachusetts plan 33 

Mathematics 135 

Men for station work 216 

Methods of teaching I73 

Military requirements 156 

Modern languages 140-153 

Observation courses 162 

Organization, college 14 

Organization, experiment station 226 

Outlying land 51 

Overlapping 108 

Phjsical problems 46 

Plant breeding 102 

President, the college 21 

Professional camps 183 

Professional studies 160-164 

Project method 182 

Publications 20i, 227 

Purposes i 

Sciences, the 130, 157 

Short courses 83 

Small vs. large college 18 

259 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Sociology 143 

Specialization 93 

Specialization, limitations of 105 

Special problems and methods 234 

Station problems and policies 220 

Statistical studies 207 

Stock breeding 102 

Summer vacation 252 

Surveys '. 207 

Syllabi 244-249 

Synthetic courses 165 

Teacher 10 

Teachers for extension service 192 

Technical courses 163 

Technical studies 160 

Technical vs. scientific training 3 

Textbook, the 174 

Trustees or regents 19 

Two-year course 80 

Vacation 252 

Variety testing 204 

Vocation as service 7 

Vocational ideal, the 120 

Vocational purpose 2 



260 



